The creators of this new Nix resource thought the existing Nix docs were a bit difficult to navigate for beginners and believe flakes are the future of Nix and wanted to introduce more people to them early in the learning process.

If Nix seems too daunting, this might just be a great way to reap one of its benefits without getting lost in its complexity.

Devbox is a command-line tool that lets you easily create isolated shells and containers. You start by defining the list of packages required by your development environment, and devbox uses that definition to create an isolated environment just for your application.

Vincent Ambo –the person behind nixery.dev, tvl.fyi, and a former Google engineer– shares his take on monorepos, Nix, and fully declarative systems without any Flux, Argo or Kubernetes.

While the tooling is impressive, it’s the principles behind it that captivated Gerhard’s imagination. Vincent has a rather interesting take on the monorepository idea, including one change - one version - one deploy. There are a lot of interesting links in the show notes, including all the code that Vincent uses to manage infrastructure.

As a result of this conversation, Gerhard is running Nix on one of his Macs, and also started experimenting with his first NixOS production instance.

Wesley Aptekar-Cassels has been using NixOS on his main laptop for ~3 years and he’s ready to talk about it:

I don’t think that NixOS is the future, but I do absolutely think that the ideas in it are, so I want to write about what I think it gets right and what it gets wrong, in the hopes that other projects can take note. As such, this post will not assume knowledge of NixOS — if you’ve used NixOS significantly, there probably isn’t anything new in here for you.

This question could be dismissed by saying that Nix and Docker are different tools that solve different problems. One is a toolkit for building and deploying containers and the other is a package and configuration manager. However, these tools do have some overlap: they can both be used to create reproducible environments.

While both tools aim to solve this problem, they take different approaches.

A solid rundown of the different approaches these two tools take, and how you might think about picking which one to use. Maybe you can have the best of both worlds?

Replit is donating $25k to the NixOS Foundation. Here’s why:

Replit has a history of betting on nascent technologies. The first version of Replit used WebAssembly long before WebAssembly found widespread adoption. We’re betting that the Nix project will improve performance across the board, sidestep a whole slew of bugs for our community, and let any Replit user build and publish programming environments.

For a primer convo on Nix, (re)visit our conversation with Domen Kozar on The Changelog.

This week we’re talking about Nix with Domen Kožar. The Nix ecosystem is a DevOps toolkit that takes a unique approach to package management and system configuration. Nix helps you make reproducible, declarative, and reliable systems. Domen is writing the Nix ecosystem guide at nix.dev and today he takes us on a deep dive on all things Nix.