The cult of Nix is taking the computing world by storm. We're witnessing rapid adoption of Nix across virtually all fields of computing. The only significant barrier to Nix adoption is typically its steep learning curve.
Through this Birds of a Feather (BoF) session, the administrators of the Flaky Bois community aim to bridge the gap between non-Nixers and the future world of computing—which is undoubtedly looking reproducible.
Nix could very well be the next MLM (but in a good way). The Nix community desperately needs both new users and power users who, when they can't install and set up a tool they want to deploy, will step forward to write the required Nix derivation and get it merged into the nixpkgs repository. This benefits newcomers and the entire community, making everyone's life easier.
Let's consign to the past those days of imperative work and non-reproducible processes. Let's walk toward a future where we don't have to reinvent the wheel every single time, again and again. The future is reproducible, and it starts with Nix.
Foundational Understanding: Gain a comprehensive overview of the Nix trinity—the language, operating system, and package manager—and how they work together to create a unified ecosystem.
Essential Tooling: Explore fundamental tools including search.nixos.org for package discovery, Flakes for project management, development shells for consistent environments, and other key utilities that make Nix productive.
Community Contribution: Understand how the broader community contributes to Nix, including pathways for newcomers to get involved and make meaningful contributions to the ecosystem.
Practical Demonstration: See real-world examples comparing imperative versus declarative approaches, highlighting how declarative methods eliminate wasted time and effort while increasing productivity and reducing work duplication.