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Comment by claytonjy | Hacker News Reader

is Nix a hurdle when onboarding engineers? do only a few people need to know the language? I've wanted to use Nix and home-manager for personal stuff but the learning curve seems big.

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In my case, adopting Nix was a response to having a poor onboarding process for new engineers. It was always fully automated, but it wasn't reliable before nix. So somebody would join the team, and it was embarrassing because the first day would be them troubleshooting a complex build process to get it to work on their machine. Not a great first impression.

So I adopted Nix "in anger" and now new machines always build successfully on the first try.

For me it was easy to set up. 80% done on the first day. It helped that I understood the conceptual model and benefits first. There's a lot of directions you can take it, I'd recommend getting something really simple working then iterating. Don't try to build the Sistine Chapel with all the different things integrated on day one.

It's hard to overstate how well that decision has worked out for me. Computers used to stress me out a lot more because of dependencies and broken builds. Now I have a much healthier relationship with computers.

Have you had problems with Nix on macOS? Nix works great for me, but I can't use it much to deal with installs or synchronize dependencies because the devs on macOS can't get Nix running.

A few people I've worked with have used our nix build successfully on MacOS, but I stick to Linux. They've told me it works fine after making some dependencies conditional. I would've expected it to be death by a million papercuts, so I'm delighted it works and a VM isn't needed.

We have devs on MacOS with Nix working, but we do encounter inconsistencies. Production & other devs are on Linux and they are having a much better time.

It's a hurdle to be able to write Nix stuff, but to consume it is pretty easy.

Shameless plug here: https://www.reactivated.io/documentation/why-nix/

I just tried Nix yesterday for the first time in order to play with reactivated. Was surprised by how simple it was to get it running. Made me think that perhaps containers are not as indispensable as I thought.

And reactivated is awesome, by the way. I just worry about how brittle it will be as both Django and React evolve.

Thanks! Hopefully not brittle at all. Specially since both React and Django are very stable projects, the latter even more than the former.

Just my experience with Nix, two or three years back: I went to the Nix website for the install instructions, saw something like "curl | sh", said "what? no way" and used the alternative non-recommended out-of-date instructions, which turned into a full-day rabbit hole until it would build. A year later I went through this again for another machine, and this time just gave up.

So I would say curl|sh is probably the way to go, which I guess means I'd only want to install it into a container. But I do really like the idea of Nix.

I grabbed a copy of that shell script, reviewed it, and committed it to git. It's extra nice to save a specific cooy of it so you get the same version of the nix cli tools across the team. It works with different versions just fine, but still better to standardize.

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