Nix has changed the way I work, it has changed the way I setup developer environments and how I manage my dotfiles. New workstations are up and running in an hour or less. This is a somewhat contrived comparison of nix and flatpack furniture assembly, getting from tools and material…
Basically nix flakes only consist of three top level elements, namely: * description (optional but recommended) * inputs (required for declaring dependencies) * outputs (defines what the flake produces) The description is just a short string, giving users a hint of what the flake is intended for. The inputs on the other hand…
There are times you think, why on earth have I only come across this now?! This was me almost two years ago, I had just discovered Nix. Originally looking for an alternative to homebrew, I stumbled across a video titled "Nix as a Homebrew replacement". Intrigued, I watched…
Thanks to various lock downs this year lots of companies were forced into facing the inevitable "digital transformation" they were putting off for so long... my current client is no exception. We started working from home in March and I haven't had to commute ever since.…
Just having installed the latest and greatest version of Ubuntu for Raspberry Pi I realised that most likely my access to the shell from my iPad wouldn't work anymore. The setup I had put together previously and worked fine on Raspberry OS just didn't work anymore.…
Repetition - time consuming and mind numbing if you have to do something manually. A lot better if you can automate... no argument there. And yet, there is always room for improvement. CI/CD State of the Nation These days we have a plethora of automation and build tools to…
So, you got a new developer machine? Whatever the reason; you now have hours of updating, installing and configuring ahead of you... yay... haven't we all been there? There is an easier™️ way and in this post I'll be walking you through how I personally go…
Just the other day I had to launch AWS instances and bootstrap them automatically without using tools like knife and chef-server. I still wanted to use chef-solo on the server itself to continue the bootstrapping process, there is only so much you would want to do using a shell script……