I've been using nix for my personal server and it's a lot of fun.

And I don't mind reading 'code as docs' in general but it's pretty much required here. Mostly the option names are pretty understandable, and it's helpful to see in the code exactly what it does, not just a human version.

But truly invaluable is sourcegraph (I guess github search is better but I still don't like it) so you can search through other peoples config https://sourcegraph.com/search?q=context:global+file:.*nix+B...

On the other hand, I wanted to have emacs compiled with sqlite (needed for magit) and it took me hours to get working, then had to keep modifying to pin the version so it didn't recompile constantly