Create a dev container for development across OS / IDEs?

[GondekNP]

It may be useful to simplify the development workflow using the devcontainer.json convention supported by VSCode, extended to other IDEs by DevPod. This would allow new developers to build a local docker dev container for any arbitrary branch, or open it on a cloud machine (such as Codespace, or GCP Compute Engine, or AWS EC2, or ...), and trash / remove them without fear of losing their development setup.

My (nick) experience is primarily in setting up devcontainers for VSCode - I have some experience using DevPod, which supports other IDEs, but I only tinkered with the cloud backend options, not with different IDES. Additionally, ensuring this works nicely with JupyterLab / JupyterLite will be an obivous priority, though there are some precedents for this within other projects.

The most minimal example I have is here (excuse the nonexistent documentation for this toy repo):
https://github.com/SchmidtDSE/ocr_extract_nps_tables/tree/main

This might be a fun Hackathon task!