Blog / Stories

This is the first in a new series of posts called "Tales from Nixpkgs" where we examine Nixpkgs commits to understand how this ecosystem works and provide a bit of visibility into the process. This also gives us a chance to show appreciation for the maintainers and perhaps also uncover interesting stories along the way. Let's take a look at a randomly picked commit from the last year of Nixpkgs: git log --pretty=oneline --since 1y | shuf | head -n1 | cut -f1 -d' ' | xargs git show…

During the COVID-19 pandemic, video conferencing turned out to be an invaluable tool for online collaboration. While many used proprietary tools for this, there is one proven free and open source video conferencing tool that also gained much traction and stayed popular: Jitsi Meet Primarily known for its publicly available service meet.jit.si, it is also possible to self-host Jitsi Meet on your own server. There are a variety of reasons why you may consider hosting Jitsi Meet yourself instead of…

This is a record of my time in the Summer of Nix holding my breath and diving into the depths of Nix to gain some Perls of wisdom. Going through the issues assigned to my team I came across the the package for OpenFoodFacts a collaborative database that collects and provides open data on 1 million food products from around the world and counting! Not knowing what we are eating seems like a strange thing. But really, how much do we know what goes into those vacuum packed bags that we open and…

72 hours out. A bead of sweat slides from your brow, falls to the marred chassis of your local build server, and sizzles into mist, leaving a scant salt stain to tell the tale. It’s the start of the hottest Summer of Nix on record, and you have three days to research, provision, configure, and deploy. With or without you, this lecture is going live. The deadline was 19 July, 2022; at five o’clock on that glistening Tuesday afternoon, one Eelco Dolstra – a living legend to those who understand –…