My Browser Has Too Many Tabs and My Brain Is Full
We need to talk about the “CLI Purist” tax. For a long time, I operated under the delusion that having twenty open SSH sessions and a terminal history full of grep commands was a sign of a robust workflow. It isn’t. It’s just high-latency troubleshooting.
In a professional environment, we prioritize “Mean Time to Recovery,” yet in our own labs, we’re often happy to spend five minutes hunting for the right directory just to see why a container is looping. I realized my brain was reaching its context-switching limit. I didn’t need more “advanced” tools; I needed to stop wasting mental cycles on the basics.
I’m Not Lazy, I’m Optimizing for Laziness
I am writing this because I’ve officially offloaded the “where is that YAML?” problem to Dockge.
I’ve looked at the heavyweights. Portainer is fine if you want to manage an entire cluster from a GUI that feels like a flight simulator, but it’s too “magical.” It wants to own your data. I have zero interest in a tool that hides my compose files in a hidden volume or a proprietary database.
Dockge is different because it’s intellectually honest. It’s a reactive UI that sits on top of your files. If I want to go back to the CLI tomorrow, my files are exactly where I left them. I’m not adopting a platform; I’m adopting a lens.
Editing on the Go Without the Vim Induced Headache
The rationale for Dockge isn’t about avoiding the terminal; it’s about shortening the distance between “I have an idea” and “It’s deployed.”
- The Single-Pane Reality: Having the logs, the YAML editor, and a live terminal on one screen isn’t just “nice”—it’s a massive reduction in cognitive load.
- Rational File Management: It organizes stacks into a clean directory structure. No more
find / -name docker-compose.ymlbecause I forgot where I cloned that one specific repo. - The Interactive Terminal: Sometimes, you just need to
execinto a container to check a config or a permission. Doing this in one click inside the browser is objectively more efficient than re-authenticating an SSH session. - No Vendor Lock-in: It uses your filesystem as the source of truth. That is “minimalist engineering” at its best.
Back to Actual Engineering
At the end of the day, infrastructure is a tool for productivity, not a monument to your ability to memorize flags. I want to build robust systems, not wrestle with syntax errors in a headless Vim session.
Switching to Dockge was a move toward rationalism. It handles the mundane tasks of monitoring and editing, allowing me to focus on the actual architecture. If your tools aren’t saving you time, they’re just overhead you can’t afford.
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