The right words in the right place - Tweag

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2024-05-02 10:00:02

This is a retrospective of my and many other people’s work on documentation in the Nix ecosystem between October 2022 and March 2024. It serves as a showcase of what we achieved together, and gives an impression of what’s involved in improving the user experience in a complex software system. A lot has happened during that time, so this text is quite lengthy.

The details of this report will mainly be interesting to power users and active contributors, or people working on software projects that are in a similar situation as Nix. For everyone else, I’d summarise the effort so far as “success in slow motion that indicates compounding effects”. Much of it was made possible through ongoing sponsorship from Antithesis, Tweag, and many individuals, along with the incredible commitment of numerous volunteers.

It may not seem like much, but these are big changes that posed enough of a challenge to arrive at. It’s still not easy or fast to learn all the things needed to wield the full power of Nix. However, there are reports of people grasping most of it within a couple of weeks on their own, which would be a significant improvement over what previously seemed to take months. And as more contributors chime in, things are continuously getting better.