What's Next — Dev Containers, Wasm, and the Trajectory

~12 min · production, future

Level 0Container Curious

0 XP0/36 lessons0/10 achievements

0/120 XP to next level120 XP to go0% complete

Dev Containers — your repo prescribes its own environment

.devcontainer/devcontainer.json tells VS Code (or GitHub Codespaces) exactly which container to use for development. New contributor clones, opens, gets a working environment in minutes. The README's 'how to set up' section becomes a config file.

WebAssembly containers

Docker now runs Wasm modules with runtimes like WasmEdge and Wasmtime. Wasm containers are 10-100x smaller and start almost instantly. They can't run unmodified Linux binaries — they need code compiled to Wasm — but for serverless and edge workloads this is a real shift.

Wasm won't replace Linux containers for full app stacks. It complements them where startup latency and image size are the bottleneck.

Code

devcontainer.json — minimal·json

{
  "name": "Python 3.12 Dev",
  "image": "mcr.microsoft.com/devcontainers/python:3.12",
  "features": {
    "ghcr.io/devcontainers/features/github-cli:1": {},
    "ghcr.io/devcontainers/features/docker-in-docker:2": {}
  },
  "forwardPorts": [8000],
  "postCreateCommand": "pip install -r requirements.txt",
  "customizations": {
    "vscode": {
      "extensions": ["ms-python.python", "charliermarsh.ruff"]
    }
  },
  "remoteUser": "vscode"
}

External links

Exercise

Add a .devcontainer/devcontainer.json to one of your real projects. Open the project in VS Code with the Dev Containers extension and verify it boots into a working dev environment. Commit the config and write 2 sentences in the README about how to use it.