It’s a new season, and a very different Platform.

New listeners probably already know what this is, but for existing listeners, here’s what’s happening. In its early days Platform was pretty Podiant focuse; not overly technical, except for podcast-specific stuff. It migrated into Bitrate with Brendan Hutchins, which is currently on a break. I always meant to come back and do another episode, so now this show is all about building a product online, with a heavy focus on the technology and its challenges.

In June, I started working on third-party integrations for Podiant. At the time my development environment involved runing a number of virtual machines via Vagrant and Ansible.. There were problems with Facebook and YouTube code, so I wanted to iterate on those without disturbing the main codebase. I needed a way for integrations to communicate with the main app, which meant each integration would need its own web server, and another virtua machine running all the inttegrations.

I got to a point where I was ready to release but I’d made a fundamental change to Podiant’s codebase and wasn’t confident launching without more testing, so I embarked on a massive project to write unit tests for the entire codebase.

This is that story, and how I began tearing the product apart, using Docker to piece it back together.