The mind has not yet completely recovered from all the brain explosions that happened during OceanSprint 2021, and I was already planning the next one. I’ve never organized two sprints so close to each other, but it worked out great! Domen and I knew exactly what we were getting into, most of the vendors we used were the same, the logistics were mostly smooth sailing — as much as they could be with the pandemic still in effect.
14 Nix hackers gathered at Niteo House back in April for a week of squashing bugs and pushing the Nix ecosystem further. Some flew in as far away as Australia to get in on the fun!
Like the previous sprint, this was a productive one:
- nix.dev tutorial‘s code samples are now tested in CI. This helps us prevent broken examples in the future.
- We are booting into M1 NixOS! Not everything works, but getting there. Lots of fixes pushed upstream.
- dream2nix automatically parses your existing projects and automatically creates flakes using the lower level tooling for each language.
- We prototyped a solution to incrementally build VirtualBox source using Nix. It’s a generic function that overrides an existing derivation by feeding in the previous output.
- If a NixOS test runs for a long time, there could for example be a typo in the script. With typechecking that’s detected before running the script, whereas before full test has to run.
- We replaced our current script logic with systemd as an opt-in. The motivation is to reduce the complexity we have to currently maintain and with the help of systemd make that layer thinner. Also worked on writing tests for the new stage-1.
- Over 40 PRs were merged. (!!)
- Started a new Nix language tutorial based on existing ones.
Sprints are not just about the code. They are also about painting a real face over that GitHub handle you have been interacting with for years. Every evening before collapsing for the night, we went out for dinner together. Niteo House is in such an amazing location, we had a number of great restaurants just a few minutes walk away. We also went to hike a volcano one afternoon, visited a vineyard, battled with waves and enjoyed a sunset from the ocean.
Catering, dinners & excursions were all covered by our amazing sponsors. It’s so great to see companies supporting the Nix community in such a generous way:
- Platonic Systems (they are hiring multiple Nix developers ATM!)
- Cyberus Technology
- flox
- Numtide
- Helsinki Systems
- Feeld
- Tweag
- Cachix
- Pareto Security
Looking forward to hosting more Nix folks on Lanzarote in the future!
