edolstra

Nix Flake MVP

Goals

• To provide Nix repositories with an easy and standard way to reference other Nix repositories.

• To allow such references to be queried and updated automatically.

• To provide a replacement for nix-channel, NIX_PATH and Hydra

yossorion

What I Wish I'd Known About Equity Before Joining A Unicorn

Disclaimer: This piece is written anonymously. The names of a few particular companies are mentioned, but as common examples only.

This is a short write-up on things that I wish I'd known and considered before joining a private company (aka startup, aka unicorn in some cases). I'm not trying to make the case that you should never join a private company, but the power imbalance between founder and employee is extreme, and that potential candidates would

edolstra

General notes

• nix-channel and ~/.nix-defexpr are gone. We'll use $NIX_PATH (or user environment specific overrides configured via nix set-path) to look up packages. Since $NIX_PATH supports URLs nowadays, this removes the need for channels: you can just set $NIX_PATH to e.g. https://nixos.org/channels/nixos-15.09/nixexprs.tar.xz and stay up to date automatically.

• By default, packages are selected by attribute name, rather than the name attribute. Thus nix install hello is basically equivalent to nix-env -iA hello. The attribute name is recorded in the user environment manifest and used in upgrades. Thus (at least by default) hello won't be upgraded to helloVariant.

  @vcunat suggested making this an arbitrary Nix expression rather than an attrpath, e.g. firefox.override { enableFoo = true; }. However, such an expression would not have a key in the user environment, unlike an attrpath. Better to require an explicit flag for this.

TBD: How to deal with search path clashes.

nelstrom

[Plover][] is an awesome open source stenography program, but to run the software [you need an NKRO keyboard][nkro]. The [ErgoDox keyboard][ergodox] can be made to run in NKRO mode by following these steps.

Install dependencies

These instructions are based on this document, which assumes you're using Windows. I'm using a mac, and I had to download and install the [CrossPack for AVR Development][crosspack] before the build process worked.

Download the source

The NKRO firmware and Plover keymap can be found in the simon_layout branch of @shayneholmes fork of tmk_keyboard. Get the source: