Building fully declarative systems with Nix (Ship It! #37)

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Vincent Ambo –the person behind nixery.dev, tvl.fyi, and a former Google engineer– shares his take on monorepos, Nix, and fully declarative systems without any Flux, Argo or Kubernetes.

While the tooling is impressive, it’s the principles behind it that captivated Gerhard’s imagination. Vincent has a rather interesting take on the monorepository idea, including one change - one version - one deploy. There are a lot of interesting links in the show notes, including all the code that Vincent uses to manage infrastructure.

As a result of this conversation, Gerhard is running Nix on one of his Macs, and also started experimenting with his first NixOS production instance.

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Featuring:

• Vincent Ambo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Website
• Gerhard Lazu – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, Website

Show Notes:

• Nixery - just-in-time container images via the Nix package manager
• Nixery: Improved Layering Design
• Nix, The One Pager - (more or less) one page introduction to Nix, the language
• NixOS - Reproducible builds and deployments
• Tvix: We are rewriting Nix
• Feature Request: Bring nix builds to buildkit
• buildGo - an alternative Nix build system for Go
• The Virus Lounge - TVL - build systems and monorepo socialising in the year of the pandemic
• TVL Code Reviews
• TVL Monorepo - Gerrit
• Just One Single History - JOSH - combines the advantages of monorepos with those of multirepos
• 🗂One Minute Presubmits - Eric Burnett, Google - London Build Meetup 2019
• Trustix: Solving trust in binary distribution and software builds
• Trustix: Distributed trust and reproducibility tracking for binary caches

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!