Looking back at NixCon 2024

2024-11-17

About three weeks ago, NixCon 2024 took place in Berlin. I recently returned to freelancing which gives me a lot more time for a lot of things, including open source projects. So naturally, as a long-time Nix user and contributor, I was inclined to attend the conference. While using Nix on the job for small bits of infrastructure work here and there was nice, I felt a little out of touch with the community and this was a welcome oppurtinity to reconnect.

I want to share a few highlights and a few thoughts on the conference. This is more of a curated link collection based on my own interests than a report.

Check out the full schedule and the NixCon YouTube channel for a more comprehensive overview and recordings.

Overall, the conference was really well organized. The venue, bUm was a good fit, providing a large auditorium and many spaces to withdraw, chat and network and hold workshops. So thank you to the NixCon organizing team for that, great job!

First of all, a talk about the current state of tvix caught my attention. Tvix is a new implementation of Nix in Rust. I was vaguely aware of the project but never really looked into it. Rewriting things in Rust is always a good idea, right? I found it quite encouraging to cross-reference this with another talk about how devenv is switching to tvix, so apparently the project has developed far enough to support this use case.

I really enjoyed the talk Call-by-hash by the people behind Garnix and also attended a fun workshop on deploying Nix-based services to their cloud platform. Garnix does not feel quite ready for production use yet, but I can see it get there soon. I would like to try it for some personal projects and see how that goes.

A few more noteworthy talks: Clan aims to make self-hosting with NixOS much easier and comin is a nice tool to deploy NixOS machines in pull-mode.

I also tried networking a little, and met a few people to talk about lix, the CppNix fork. That motivated me to look into the project more and I actually landed my first little bug fix last week. 🥳 I enjoyed the process, it was quite smooth and the maintainers were very helpful.

On a more political note, I was very curious about the Nix constitutional assembly panel. There has been a lot of discussion about the governance of the Nix project and seeing that this process is taking shape now in a democratic way is reassuring. In the meantime the elections to the steering committee have also concluded, so now the work actually commences. We have already seen some fracturing with people migrating away from the original Nix to either tvix or lix, so I wonder if the steering committee can meaningfully adress the underlying issues. At least it seems like they are going in the right direction.

From what I have gathered in community discussions these issues amount to unchecked hierarchies such as the RFC process being undermined by core maintainers, undisclosed conflicts of interest and a lack of transparency and inclusion. I still don't feel entirely in the loop on these issues, but this open letter provides a good summary.

A somewhat unsettling development was the flurry of announcements by Determinate Systems around the conference: they called to stabilize flakes asap and announced a proprietary daemon to manage Nix. All of that happened online. It all seemed like they were trying to steer the narrative around upcoming governance decisions. The condemnation of this unilateral behavior appeared fairly universal in the community – at least among those unaffiliated or entangled with DetSys. I did not notice much of that conflict spilling into the conference itself.

Okay, enough of the political stuff. Check out this cute Nix necklace I obtained from a friendly cat person at the conference:

In summary, there are lots of interesting developments in the Nix community and I am glad to have caught up. Looking forward, I want to contribute more to the ecosystem. The political situation is somewhat worrying, but I am optimistic that we can work through these issues and more personally, that I will find a way to navigate that without getting caught up in stressful conflicts.