Weekly Journal 158 - Nix

Nix

This week I took my first baby steps with the Nix package manager. I’m really interested in building reproducible environments using Nix. I’m currently running Nix on top of openSuse Tumbleweed instead of taking the going all the way down the rabbit hole and installing NixOS. One of the concepts I find fascinating is that Nix isn’t tightly coupled to NixOS, and that the environments defined using Nix exist separately from the base system. This allows me to create a custom Nix environment for every project, and it allows me to easily share that environment definition with others so that we’re all using the same tools and components.

The downside to Nix is that it’s a complicated beast. There are a lot of knobs to turn and it’s going to take a while to learn how it all works. I would also like to see if Nix can be combined with containers, as that feels like it could be an interesting combination.

DevOpsCLE

This week I went to my first tech meetup since COVID. Many of the meetups in my area shut down with during pandemic and never started back up. Thankfully, a couple of technologists in the area decided to restart the DevOpsCLE group. For this first meeting there was really good presentation and discussion around building a great engineering culture.