FreeAssembly

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this is FreeAssembly, a non-toxic design, programming, and art collective. post your share-alike (CC SA, GPL, BSD, or similar) projects here! collaboration is welcome, and mutual education is too.

in brief, this community is the awful.systems answer to Hacker News. read this article for a solid summary of why having a less toxic collaborative community is important from a technical standpoint in addition to a social one.

some posting guidelines apply in addition to the typical awful.systems stuff:

all types of passion projects and contributions are welcome, including and especially those that aren't programming or engineering in nature
this is an explicitly noncommercial, share-alike space
don't force yourself to do work you don't enjoy, or demand it of others

(logo credit, with modifications by @dgerard@awful.systems)

founded 11 months ago

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self@awful.systems

ask me questions about awful.systems or NixOS! (codeberg.org)

submitted 11 months ago by self@awful.systems to c/freeasm@awful.systems

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the awful.systems server cluster runs on an open infrastructure based on NixOS and Nix flakes, and though it desperately needs cleanup in some places, it's still a pretty good example of how to use a Nix flake to deploy NixOS in production. feel free to browse the repo and ask any questions about how it works, or about Nix in general!

also, if I get hit by a bus, this can be used to redeploy awful.systems elsewhere. an existing admin who isn't in the hospital or the grave can import a database backup and get back up and running!

and as always, contributions are welcome.

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[–] self@awful.systems 1 points 11 months ago

of course!

you’re definitely right about needing to be a particular type of insane for Nix to fully click, and I’ve seen enough people bounce off of it that I try to make Nix optional (but very nice to have) wherever I can

with that said, there are a few areas where what Nix does is irreplaceable. broadly, areas like deployments (devops), embedded development (where Nix’s methods of cross compilation and target configuration are much saner and more reliable than average), and developer tooling are where it’s extraordinarily difficult to replicate what Nix provides, and those are also the areas where I’ve personally seen the most production usage of Nix.

I don’t personally coordinate a professional team that uses Nix, but it might be worth looking up impressions from companies that do. to my memory, two companies I know use Nix heavily are Pololu Robotics and replit (which uses Nix as a user-facing part of their developer tooling; fair warning though, last time I looked they were heavily enshittifying and pushing a bunch of AI shit).