Hey bud bud, I hope you are good. Spring is in full swing and this bear is loving it...I have also found something along my journey that so immensely awesome that I had to share with you as well.

But first, the obligatory preamble.

The way is long

This bear, has spent a fair bit of time getting lost in some really deep and dark recesses of the woods in his journey of becoming a full-stack web developer.

Hours, maybe days, perhaps weeks would go by in utter folly trying to either backtrack out of one thicket of bugs and problems only to land in another.

Battered, bruised, and tired, we moved on, only to be confronted by something more sinister and even more taxing. For there are all sorts of nasty and malevolent evil that reside in the deepest darkest parts off the woods.

Many said at the start it was foolhardy to undertake such a mission especially alone, the laughter ringing in the ears of the bear as he left town and started to make his way, on his own. In front lay a promising path, one of support and easy terrain.

The guide markers at the start were plentiful, but grew increasingly sporadic in their appearance. The further on the path the more rough the terrain and darker it became. The canopy of the forest that looked lush and promising from afar, now towers menacingly into the sky, preventing all natural light from making its way below.

The constant nocturnal environment requires a lot of energy to force adapting to these new and very unfamiliar environment.

The first real hurdle on the journey was when the first learning curve came. HTML stood in the way, a truly magnanimous foe, the knowledge gained from such a challenge was rewarding and fulfilling. It replenished the sapped energy from climbing my first mountain in the dark.

At its peak was a brief opportunity to gaze out over the vista, it was here did I see or get the sense of what lay before me.

A vast, treacherous mountain range for as far as the eye could see. Mountains in the distance that rose so high into the sky that clouds form at their waist hiding their magnificent peaks behind thick grey clouds. Below in the gullies lay more of the forest, only getting thicker and deeper with each mile.

The path was set, the next destination on the journey was Mount CSS. Still exuberant from completing HTML. Climbing CSS proved a challenge. It quickly discovers if you are creatively skilled or not. And is extremely unforgiving to those who struggled to make even the simplest paw prints.

With creativity now inflicted into me, the solid path forwards began too decay and became totally amorphous. It would often double back on the way we had already came. With each backward detour, small bit of knowledge that previously escaped our grasp at the time would be found.

The knowledge gained on the journey was the only source of illumination deep in the forest when all the natural light was lost, and the blackness envelopes you whole.

Right before I nearly fell face first into a chasm that was miles wide, and appeared to open into the very earth itself. I was saved by a few natives. Other developer critters who made homes and lives deep in the woods.

At first the few whom I encountered felt alien and strange that they would live here. But the more I learned the more critters I began to see make life and joy in these very woods.

It was a strange magical effect, like a veil being slowly raised to the rate of our progress through the woods. At what could be felt as half-way, I could here music and laughter coming from somewhere in the trees.

Being led to the bridge over the chasm of eternal damnation. This rickety log bridge with ropes that look like they were fashioned from a material that has very little tensile strength. Was a challenge of commitment. It was a one-way journey, because nobody in their right mind would willingly re-cross that bridge again.

Then came the magnificent giant. Mount JavaScript. This was one tough bitch to climb. At times you would be holding on to dear life on a vertical cliff-face whilst hundred mile an hour winds sucked the very air out of your lungs. Next you would be fending of wolves and bugs the size of nightmares.

Tired and fatigued, we still persevered, only to really hit the first of what would be hundreds of false summits on this insurmountable, unforgiving mountain.

Walking blindly from one blizzard to the next, all concepts of time were lost. Then one-day, a path appears. It felt like the faith had been tested and through perseverance and resolve did it appear. A stairway that led directly up and above the cloud layer.

Up hear the sky is clear. The first time on the journey could we bask in sunlight. Below the thick mass of clouds lay the even thicker forest, but from up here you can only see possibilities.

At the summit, we could see the full plain of the world below. In the far off lays the sea, the warm golden beaches could be seen as a thin thread of gold before the green turquoise of the sea.

All around are other mountain tops, in the distance is a huge and fearsome looking mountain, that critters call Mount C, and its three peaks, C, C++, and C#. Other similarly daunting mountains break the cloud cover as well, ranges like Mount Go, Mount Rust and others.

Smaller ones like Mount Python scrap past the clouds, but I was amazed and shocked that I couldn't see CSS or HTML pierce the clouds when I looked behind.

From here the journey looked clear. Feeling stronger and more battle hardened, the decent from Mount JavaScript was quick, for it lead to Mount TypeScript, from there to databases then to API's.

Then I entered the Backend Range, a densely packed, jagged range of sharp rocks and towering columns. It was an arduous and even more difficult experience than walking through the front-end forest.

Here the winds carried the language of network requests, the air was buzzing with data exchanges. This particular mountain range is even more diverse than before with even steeper learning curves.

Sitting in a lake in the heart of the Backend Range, I came across something wonderful.

A Magical Blue Whale, called Docker... Then that whole journey, all the difficulties, every high and low, all of it, was seen through the prism of its magical blue lens. Then the whole valley, the mountain ranges, the critters, everything... it all made sense.

Docker is magical, it fly's because it fundamentally controls the entire web development environment. It's a critical ally for developers. It creates controlled environments that would let our applications run on servers and data centres all around the tinder web.

It's own history of how it came to be, is a story of amalgamation of several independent skills and disciplines. Far more skilled critters came together to create a system that fundamentally changes how applications are created and deployed. A lot of the mysticisms that was picked up on the journey now seems clear.

What was once the dream of becoming a full-stack web developer, has became more real and apparent than ever before.

All thanks to Docker.

Now I am sitting on the edge of the beach, waiting to be allowed on, so I too can laugh and play with all the other full stack developers.

I hope you enjoyed my somewhat fantasied description of my own journey in web-development. It is in no way over, in fact I have a funny feeling that the real hard work is yet to start...

I will be making a write up on docker soon, so do keep posted for that one, when I get a chance to do an actual write up on in...

Keep on rocking in the free world bud...