Learn Nix the Fun Way

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2024-07-06 21:30:12

This is a post inspired by many talks I’ve given to engineering groups about Nix. You can see an example of one such talk Why I love Nix, and you should too

I’ve given a lot of Nix talks. I’ve given Nix talks internally at companies where I’ve introduced it, at local meetups and even at NixCon.

Giving a talk about Nix is hard. As engineers I find often we try to explain why or how Nix works but never show the end result.

Many of the talks I’ve given start explaining “Nix developed as part of Eelco’s PhD thesis in 2003” and immediately eyes roll.

Sure, it’s sort of portable, if you tell the person running it to have curl and jq. What if you relied on a specific version of either though?

Now that this is in Nix and we’ve modeled our dependencies, we can do fun things like generate graph diagrams to view them (click the image to view larger).

Let’s create a developer environment and bring in our new tool. This is a great way to create developer environment with reproducible tools