NixOS: the power of VM tests | Brian McGee
Brian McGee's personal profile and blog| Brian McGee
Brian McGee's personal profile and blog| Brian McGee
I’m sitting here, in an Airbnb in Brussels, after a long weekend of talking tech and drinking beer during my first FOSSDEM. Seems like as good a time as any then to try and restart my regular posting schedule 😂. That being said, given that my physical, mental and spiritual battery is running low 😫, I’m going to keep this one simple and to the point. Much like the topic of today’s blog post 😉.| Brian McGee
I’ve been an avid user of treefmt, and it’s nix companion treefmt-nix, for a couple of years now. Whenever I start a new project, one of the first things I do is configuring treefmt with all the linters and formatters for the stack I’ll be using. I just love being able to run treefmt and have a vast array of linters and formatters take care of cleaning up my project in one go.| bmcgee.ie
This week, I ran into a problem. I was working on a client project, and as I was building a derivation, it took a loooong time to download substitutions from the configured binary caches. Now, the derivation in question has many input derivations for reasons that may become clearer in a future blog post. That being said, according to my betters at Numtide, the Nix daemon should pull them down from the binary caches with a reasonable degree of concurrency.| bmcgee.ie
It was a good run. Longer than most, I would say. But after two months of getting my hands dirty with NATS as I’ve been building out Nits, I discovered my first gripe: controlling read/write permissions for KV and Object stores. Having reached a point where I could successfully deploy NixOS closures to my test VMs, I began reviewing my prototype and looking for areas where I could improve.| bmcgee.ie
Brian McGee's personal profile and blog| Brian McGee
Today, I was asked what the canonical way to use Nix is. After a brief pause, I responded with the old joke about asking 100 Nix users how to do something and getting 200 solutions back 🤷. A short chuckle later, I went on to describe my canonical way of using Nix. It’s been nearly a year since I wrote a retrospective about my first experiences with Nix and NixOS.| bmcgee.ie
It was the Numtide Retreat 2022 when I first laid eyes on it… After arriving late the night before, I had slept in a bit, and as I was slowly booting up for the day, coffee in hand, I wandered into the dining room where everyone was set up for the day. And there it was. This peculiar-looking split keyboard with big ass red buttons. I was intrigued. Mind you, this was a work retreat for a group of people who spend a lot of their days working with and writing Nix.| bmcgee.ie
Ok, before we get started, the name isn’t great. I get it. But in my defence, naming things is hard, and I wanted something short for the eventual cli command. So let’s take it as read that I have heard your groans and accept your position that Nvix as a name is lame and should be changed at my earliest convenience 😉. With that out of the way, let’s get to it.| bmcgee.ie
For the past week, I have been staying in Sitges, a small town just outside of Barcelona, where I have been hacking away until 2 a.m. and having long discussions about life, business, trends in software development and what the next year might look like. At first glance, it may appear like some developer mid-life crisis, where I try to convince myself I can still stay up past 10:30 p.| bmcgee.ie
Brian McGee's personal profile and blog| Brian McGee
