Nix remains my superpower
I’ve long considered fluency in Nix to be a superpower that pays off way more than you might imagine, if you haven’t experienced it yourself.
Sure, it helps with the obvious practical things you’d expect - my system setup is declarative, reproducible, and suffers from vanishingly few chaotic state-based issues that tend to plague less reproducible systems (like brew
in particular).
There are plenty of downsides too - I run into nix-specific issues that my colleagues with more normal setups don’t suffer. Interactions with tools like bundler
building native extensions can be frustrating at best.
Those are the unsurprising, surface level tradeoffs when using a good-but-novel package manager. The real superpower comes through the staggering amount of things which are not just possible, but downright straightforward due to the reliable, principled way that nix works. Here’s a good example from last week: