We acquired a small team of Cambridge-based computer science & systems engineering wizards, called Unikernel. We then worked together to apply systems engineering to improving and expanding Docker in various ways.
The most successful project that we worked on together was "project Piñata" which later became Docker for Mac. It turns out bundling a Linux VM in a native Mac app, and integrating it into the host filesystem, networking stack etc requires lots of magic..
Now, most of the Unikernel team were very active OCaml developers, and created MirageOS among other ocaml projects. While working on Piñata, they simply reached for the tools they were most familiar with.
When acquiring our company, Solomon took us to a remote farm in France for a week for an offsite, fed us fantastic food and wine, and the first prototype of that Docker for Mac VM was working by the end of the week! It took a few months to hack together the shell. There's a video of Solomon and the pinãta launch party on my blog ;-) https://anil.recoil.org/notes/cacm-docker-cover#getting-invo...
There was a whole other slice of work we did for project Piñata too in the form of datakit (https://github.com/moby/datakit) that was well ahead of its time. I was looking at this archived code again just last week while thinking about agentic git workflows!
I am having a blast working on environmental science these days, and we’re long overdue a beer next in SF!
Am firing up Dagger to give it a try on our geospatial workflows for the first time just now; it’s got the same attention to CLI detail as Docker 1.0 did :-)
(Joining the reunion thread) I was just explaining to a new starter yesterday why Docker Desktop used the codename "pinata". Also I reckon some of the more advanced ideas from back then are still relevant today, probably even more now that everything is changing (or can be changed) with agents. Hope all is well!
We acquired a small team of Cambridge-based computer science & systems engineering wizards, called Unikernel. We then worked together to apply systems engineering to improving and expanding Docker in various ways.
The most successful project that we worked on together was "project Piñata" which later became Docker for Mac. It turns out bundling a Linux VM in a native Mac app, and integrating it into the host filesystem, networking stack etc requires lots of magic..
Now, most of the Unikernel team were very active OCaml developers, and created MirageOS among other ocaml projects. While working on Piñata, they simply reached for the tools they were most familiar with.
(Unikernel cofounder here)
When acquiring our company, Solomon took us to a remote farm in France for a week for an offsite, fed us fantastic food and wine, and the first prototype of that Docker for Mac VM was working by the end of the week! It took a few months to hack together the shell. There's a video of Solomon and the pinãta launch party on my blog ;-) https://anil.recoil.org/notes/cacm-docker-cover#getting-invo...
There was a whole other slice of work we did for project Piñata too in the form of datakit (https://github.com/moby/datakit) that was well ahead of its time. I was looking at this archived code again just last week while thinking about agentic git workflows!
Hi Anil! Welcome to the 2026 Docker reunion thread :)
How did I not know about this video until today!
Hope you're doing well.
I am having a blast working on environmental science these days, and we’re long overdue a beer next in SF!
Am firing up Dagger to give it a try on our geospatial workflows for the first time just now; it’s got the same attention to CLI detail as Docker 1.0 did :-)
(Joining the reunion thread) I was just explaining to a new starter yesterday why Docker Desktop used the codename "pinata". Also I reckon some of the more advanced ideas from back then are still relevant today, probably even more now that everything is changing (or can be changed) with agents. Hope all is well!
I'm glad to hear that DfD's repo is still the piñata!!! Congrats on the Docker sandbox launch as well, great to see it integrated now.