Nix is the best configuration management tool. Declarative, programmable, version controlled machine configs, what more could you want?

One small issue I’ve encountered lately is being able to quickly and automatically convert text from one structured form to another.

My go-to tool for this has been macros, but regex capture groups should work just as well.

TLDR: Use Nix to install and manage your personal packages instead of build/cp/chmox +x.

Problem#

I’m writing a CLI tool - called hmm - in Haskell that manages tmux sessions. By default, I want it to open a session named after the current git context. I.e. if I’m working on branch bar in repo foo I want the session to be named foo-bar. However, on rare occasions, I might want to override either value. To do this, I have optional command line flags

I created a new command on my Discord bot (PR #16) that fetches the status of the Minecraft servers running on minecraft.kgb33.dev. When running locally it worked perfectly, but when running in production it fails silently. This post outlines the debugging steps I took to solve the issue.

I’m trying out daily driving NixOS and one of the problems I have is knowing when updates are available. On NixOS all the packages are defined in a giant git repository - github:nixos/nixpkgs - and updates are commits to the various branches (called channels) of this repo. Then, my system is locked to a particular commit hash for whichever channel I’m comfortable running. Thus, to find out if there are updates available I just have to check if the most recent hash is in the lock file.

Go play in traffic - Parents everywhere

Once more they lifted sails, and once more they took the Argo into the open sea. - Jason and Medea

Thrice a day would Talos stride around the island; his brazen feet were tireless. - The Story of Perseus