Brussels / 4 & 5 February 2023

schedule

Pitfalls of Nix and how to overcome them


You want to use Nix at your job to build and deploy your fantastic application. And you even managed to convince your boss or your customer that it’s the right tool to use. Amazing! At this stage, what can possibly go wrong? Developers! While you are enthusiastic about Nix and wholeheartedly love it, your fellow colleagues may be quite skeptical about using a new tool they have never heard of. “My programming language has that shiny build tool that everyone uses, why do I need to use Nix?“, “My OS distribution has standard package manager, why should I install another one?“, “Oh, no-no-no, I once installed Nix and it ate hundreds gigabytes of my disk space, I will never do it again” — these are possible reasons why developers may be quite reluctant to using Nix. You can still go ahead and use it, but you may end up in the situation when nobody else understands and nobody wants to understand how things work, so people will request your help whenever they need to touch anything related to Nix, even if they just need to run one command on their machine. If you don’t want this to happen, before introducing Nix in your codebase it’s important to tell developers what they should expect, what concerns they may have and what to do with them. In this talk, we will elaborate on some intimidating factors of Nix and possible solutions to them.

Speakers

Philipp Herzog

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