For a long time the first fifteen minutes of my workday belonged to a whale. I'd open the laptop, hear the fans spin up, watch "Docker Desktop is updating," and wait - all so I could run a single local Postgres container that my Mac was perfectly capable of running on its own. The morning three people on my team showed up late to standup for the exact same reason ("my fans won't stop and Postgres won't bind," "I ran docker compose up and my battery's already at 40%"), something in me finally snapped. This is the brew services setup that got Docker Desktop off our machines, and honestly, made local development feel joyful again.
Why this bugged me for years
Our local stack was not exotic. One docker-compose.yml with Postgres, Redis, and MySQL. That's it. And yet Docker Desktop's VM taxed every machine the entire day - idle RAM I could feel, CPU burned on file-sync I never asked for, a licensing question hanging over the whole thing, and that update nag that always seemed to block me at the worst possible moment.
The licensing part had teeth, too. Under the Docker Subscription Service Agreement, Docker Desktop needs a paid subscription once your company is big enough - the free tier caps out under 250 employees and $10M revenue. We were over one of those lines, which meant Docker Desktop wasn't only a performance tax, it was a per-seat bill for the privilege of running one Postgres. That combination gnawed at me for a genuinely embarrassing amount of time before I did anything about it.
