Articles about Setting Up [X] in 5 minutes with Docker are an anti-pattern

Sure, you can get the bare limitations of setting up just about anything down to less than 5 minutes…but should you?

You might tell yourself “yeah it’s a quick way to do something, so I’ll write it up.” Think about this… there are new developers out there. They will read your article. They won’t know 💩 about security, networking, databases, web servers…did I mention security?

But hey, it only took 5 minutes, right? Just because something is simple doesn’t make it good. Most decent developers will tell you simple is hard. If you have a developer saying that setting some public web application will take less than an hour, then they are either misinformed (via some bad articles) or have quite a bit of tooling to set up and secure said application. Remember the Three Things Triangle: Fast, Good, and Cheap. You can only pick two. The five minute Docker approach = Fast + Cheap. Enjoy your upcoming bad times.

But you wrote the article anyway, and now there are a bunch of noobs out there running around saying they’re an expert in [X] and throwing up slow insecure installs of [blog software] for their family members on Cheap-O-Hosting. So odd how the next week every single one of their sites is compromised in some fashion because they didn’t understand the underlying logic or configuration of one of the many parts that fit together to make [X] run.

So I say to you, dear reader, if you do need to set up some docker thing quickly, do NOT expose it to the Internet. It should be considered a play thing. If you write one of those dreaded articles, please add a header and footer in 32 point blinking font saying not to do this in production, let alone expose it to the Internet, as it’s just an oversimplified example.