Nix, NixOS and NixPkgs allows us to to create project-specific development environments with project-specific dependencies (this usually means things like a C project, or a Python project... etc). The way this is done is different for every language community within the Nix ecosystem. The most well developed patterns would be…
This introduction assumes you have played with NixOS a bit, you know about content addressability and why it is important, and how Git repositories represent a distributed content addressed storage system. Git and Github is used as the source control for all of NixOS and NixPkgs. Both NixOS and NixPkgs…
Configuration divergence is a result of change entropy in an environment that doesn't enforce referential integrity between loosely-coupled state or "state-at-a-distance". Simultaneously this allows the anti-pattern of action at a distance. This phenomenon is also called "Connascence" and I have also called this "meta-coupling"…
Today, the most common way for developers to address a dependency is through the use of semantic versioning. This is where you create project A that depends on B at 1.2.3, where 1 is the major version, 2 is the minor version and 3 is the patch version.…
Ever since we read Domen Kožar's thoughts on how Nix and NixOS is a superior configuration management system because it features: Declarative Semantics Stateless Deterministic (pure) Avoids dependency hell Idempotent Atomic/Transactional Reversible or Rollbacks We've been thinking about how to apply the Nix philosophy to live database migrations. (Specifically…