The case for composition-addressed systems.
the world hasn’t figured out yet that you can literally just fix everything with a Nix overlay
There are many things that are uncertain in our industry right now, but one thing I am certain about, and have been for almost 13 years, is that Nix is a terrible programming language. I remember when I first learned it, it felt like pushing shit uphill. The learning cliff
I've gone full Nix: Proxmox to NixOS + Incus | Bas Nijholt
After years of running a Proxmox cluster, I migrated my entire homelab to NixOS with Incus. I explain the philosophical friction of imperative 'appliance' OSs vs declarative hosts, share how I migrated my LXC/VM workloads, and why it is the perfect infrastructure to manage using AI agents.
Please Stop Using `nixos-rebuild switch`
Better practices for safely and reliably deploying and updating NixOS systems.
Secrets Don’t Belong in Config
An audit of 445 NixOS modules shows the cost of making configuration and secrets share one interface.
Lexicon Service Docs - at:// pizza thoughts
Riffing on some ways to make network services more legible to humans and machines
nix-community/nixos-apple-silicon
Resources to install NixOS bare metal on Apple Silicon Macs [maintainers=@tpwrules,@flokli,@yuyuyureka]
DASL — Data-Addressed Structures & Links
A small set of simple, standard primitives to work on content-addressed data.
DASL — Data-Addressed Structures & Links
A small set of simple, standard primitives to work on content-addressed data.
Improving My Hardware Workflow With CI and Nix
One thing you might notice if you read my blog is that I do a lot of hardware projects. Generally, these include a board, some software, and possibly some extraneous components (like CAD design, such as a case). Software tooling is quite mature, but I find that hardware had traditionally lagged quite a bit behind. For a while, I just lived with this, but over the last few months I've put in a bunch of effort to improve my workflow.
Serpentine software
I don’t usually write hot takes. But StrongDM’s Software Factory post is worth it, so here goes. Their post is elegant, short, and well-written, so I’m going to just go through a bunch of pull quotes. Compounding correctness long-horizon agentic coding workflows [now] compound correctness rather than error This is a big, empirical claim. I’m already convinced by my own experiences that agents, suitably scaffolded, can form a Brownian ratchet, such that pouring on more compute helps, on balance.
Conway's Law | Laws of Software Engineering
Organizations design systems that mirror their own communication structure.
Forking is Cool, or: A Unix Shell in Zig, or: Dave Learns How to Fork - ratfactor
In this article, I make a real, working interactive shell written in Zig. Though essentially a toy, it demonstrates the incredible elegance of the fork() system call and is an example of what can be done with absolutely no runtime memory allocations.
Linux kernel will support $ORIGIN, sort of
For some reason, during TacoSprint 2026 I decided to see if we could tackle relocatable binaries in Nix.
I can haz smoller NixOS ISOs? | natkr's ramblings
In which I painstakingly remove functionality from a Linux live image. Like a normal person.
