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drakerossman

659 karma · joined January 5, 2022

Personal website - https://drakerossman.com Email - drake.rossman [at] protonmail.com Would be happy to hear from you!
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drakerossman··on Stripe's Monorepo Developer Environment
It (obviously) leverages Nix, which in turn means the environment is declarative and fully reproducible (not "reproducible" as in docker). Now, you can use just Nix's devShells, but with devenv you have a middleground between just Nix package manager and a full fledged NixOS module system. Basically, write out one line of code - and you've got your Postgres, another one - full linter set up for whatever language you're using, etc.
drakerossman··on Hyprland Crash Course
Something like for 3 years. Absolutely fascinated by it. Writing a book about it too: https://drakerossman.com/blog/practical-nixos-the-book

Also check the "nix" tag at blog.

drakerossman··on Hyprland Crash Course
If you don't mind me replying in place of the orginal poster:

Sway is just i3 for Wayland, which in turn means you have multiple workspaces (which are also potentially mapped to multiple monitors). You assign workspace a label (number, or text, or emoji), and you may also bind some application to always open on that workspace. Or you just get a habit of putting specific applications to only specific workspaces. Your entire navigation then sits in your muscle memory - finger on the mod key (win or alt or ctrl - whatever), another finger on the digits row for the workspace index - and you're there.

It's a tiling WM, so you don't spend time arranging windows - they already take the full desktop real estate evenly split between them, and you can also adjust size of each window separately. Again, this sits in your muscle memory.

Point is - no mouse is needed to navigate through workspaces and windows.

You may read my blog post about setting sway up (on NixOS) here:

https://drakerossman.com/blog/wayland-on-nixos-confusion-con...

drakerossman··on Super Micro Computer has gone from an obscure server maker to $60B market cap
Who's their competition? What's their moat, except for being 15-minutes drive away from Nvidia's HQ?
drakerossman··on Open-source project ZLUDA lets CUDA apps run on AMD GPUs
It now supports AMD GPUs since 3 weeks ago, check the latest commit at the repo:

https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA

The article also mentions exactly this fact.

drakerossman··on Browser extensions are underrated: the promise of hackable software (2019)
A somewhat-shameless plug here, since I've released this just yesterday:

Browser Extension for Hacker News written in Rust WASM:

https://github.com/drakerossman/hackernews-userscript

It has filtering capabilities (filter in title, link, text, or username via regex) and softhide (hide all the items on a page without pulling others from the next page).

drakerossman··on Nix Home Manager Option Search
Fear not, these are configuration options for a project called Home Manager, which manages your user configuration and dotfiles with the help of Nix the package manager:

https://drakerossman.com/blog/how-to-add-home-manager-to-nix...

drakerossman··on Flakes aren't real and cannot hurt you: using Nix flakes the non-flake way
Could you tell me your secrets in achieving so many stars?

I have a similar albiet differently-structured guide at https://github.com/drakerossman/nixos-musings, but nowhere near the amount of stars you have.

drakerossman··on Flakes aren't real and cannot hurt you: using Nix flakes the non-flake way
Thank you for the feedback and kind words, and you're absolutely right. I have also gotten this feedback on improving my written communication skills already in the past.

I unfortunately have very little time to edit the posts, and for the stuff not yet posted, I do not like to post the drafts. And I have tons (tons!!!) of such drafts. A promise to myself I made is that I am going to have a good cadence of posting for this year.

There are definitely more articles to come, till end of January for sure, and if you've found the stuff useful/intersting, you may would want to subscribe on some medium I use (say Twitter, or Mastodon, links on my website).

drakerossman··on Flakes aren't real and cannot hurt you: using Nix flakes the non-flake way
You may want to try this: https://drakerossman.com/blog/wayland-on-nixos-confusion-con...
drakerossman··on Flakes aren't real and cannot hurt you: using Nix flakes the non-flake way
For the non-initiated, who also have experience with the likes of Ubuntu and Fedora, I made an overview of NixOS in this article, which also provides a guidance on how to bootstrap a functional desktop system: https://drakerossman.com/blog/nixos-for-apt-yum-users-a-gift...

Also discussing flakes in some other articles of mine.

drakerossman··on Impermanence
You may want to read my blog post [1] on that one. It explains exactly how to install Sway with Home Manager.

And no, it is not a design error to have Home Manager separated from nixpkgs, and unlike a child reply suggests, there's no "schism", and the reasons for separation are rather prosaic, as explained in another blog post of mine [2].

[1] https://drakerossman.com/blog/wayland-on-nixos-confusion-con...

[2] https://drakerossman.com/blog/how-to-add-home-manager-to-nix...

drakerossman··on Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?
https://drakerossman.com Mostly Nix/NixOS, some Rust, some management, some architecture. But mostly NixOS, for which I am writing a book.
drakerossman··on Wayland on NixOS: Confusion, Conquest, Triumph
Thank you for your comment velcrovan, but I don't agree with this sentiment. I've been using Ubuntu for personal laptop for a decade, and whatever for a given corporate laptop, and was reluctant to dig into NixOS, until it clicked - the point is to have it done once, and you won't have to do it ever again! NixOS is the only one that allows so.
drakerossman··on Why and how to add Home Manager to NixOS
Thank you for pointing that out!
drakerossman··on Why and how to add Home Manager to NixOS
>If only.

Could you please elaborate?

drakerossman··on Ask HN: How to run Language Models on your own?
https://stateofart.ai/

Disclosure: I am the author of the website, and it's extremely light on content currently.

drakerossman··on 20 years of Nix
Yes, and was, to be quite honest, not quite impressed. They lay a foundation stone, but don't actually go that much further.
drakerossman··on 20 years of Nix
Thank you for pointing that out! I have a twitter with the same handle, if you would like to subscribe to that. If not - wouldn't you mind a follow-up email when I fix the subscription form?
drakerossman··on 20 years of Nix
What I see as a barrier for entry to Nix/NixOS is not the UX, but the available documentation, or lack of thereof. One may consider the docs being part of UX though. I am in the process of writing a book about NixOS, you may track the progress here: https://drakerossman.com/blog/practical-nixos-the-book

The emphasis is on how to make it as practical as possible, plus cover the topics which may apply to Linux in general, and in great detail.

drakerossman··on The Determinate Nix Installer
I'm writing a book about NixOS, you may track the progress here: https://drakerossman.com/blog/practical-nixos-the-book

It's more NixOS oriented, but most of the knowledge is obviously transferable to a bare-bones (if one could say that) Nix installation on top of other OSes.

With regards to all the Nix/NixOS documentation already out there, I'm trying to keep my stuff extremely straight-forward and rather simplistic (but not superficial), so the people outside of Nix (and even outside of Linux) may give it a solid try.

Just to note, if you wish to subscribe to the newsletter, it's broken now, gonna fix it in a few days.

Also a question to @grhmc: would you maybe have some doc that describes how to UN_install nix via your installer on macOS?

drakerossman··on Zero to Nix, an unofficial, opinionated, gentle introduction to Nix
If you don't mind, a shameless plug:

https://drakerossman.com/blog/nixos-for-apt-yum-users-a-gift...

I am doing a similar series of NixOS-related stuff, currently got only a single article out, yet quite "meaty".

You may want to check it out for a more streamlined approach in learning nix/NixOS which also compares it to familiar concepts from other Linux distributions. Will be releasing way more complete articles in the nearest future, hopefully within the next 2-3 weeks.

drakerossman··on Ask HN: What are you working on this year?
I've got a lot of drafts (counting in the low hundreds), but I am not quite for publishing unfinished stuff. So this year I'm going heavy on publishing that. In addition, I have several projects on my mind I'll be working on this year:

- A browser extension for HN written in WASM (Rust)

- A book about NixOS

- Want to finally set a start up, hopefully, I'll have something to show within 2 months

I also have a newsletter for my blog [0]. If you wish to track the progress on the mentioned items, feel free to subscribe, that would be highly appreciated. Btw, people are subscribing, but many have not confirmed their subscription (newsletter is double opt-in).

[0] https://drakerossman.com

drakerossman··on Snippet-Driven Development
It is a nice comparison, but I would honestly say, that I never had Unix in mind in regards to this approach. And I would say, it again lacks the "catch" I've mentioned in the article: Unix philosophy implies composability, while here you treat your snippets as etudes, isolated etudes, which may or may not compose well, while always keeping in mind, that you are doing all that to eventually tackle a bigger problem.
drakerossman··on Snippet-Driven Development
Thank you for all the valuable feedback. And thank you for the insight on how your team organizes a logbook. I'll try to expand on the process of the snippet organization itself when I have time for it (there's a newsletter on my website you may want to subscribe to).

Addressing the "fully self-sufficient program" - no, the imports are limited to minimum, at least from the owned codebase. 3rd party libraries are okay - the point is to limit the system coupling, and also to provide a fresh and unburdened look onto the functionality piece. Think github gists - you find them via google, they solve some pain point of yours, and they also serve as an "etude" for their authors.

After all, this development approach is a very psychological thing (and I would say, every approach is). It also aims to solve the issue of developer's burnout, the fear of an extremely big-scoped work, and gives possibility to ship as often as physically possible. Having a lot of snippets is way better than having something in development for weeks without any insight on what is being worked on. And when you've accumulated quite a lot of snippets, the task of gluing those together becomes a rather playful quasi-snippet in itself.

Speaking of the "framework-heavy" stuff, React included, - yes, it would definitely be harder to implement this strategy compared to, say, backend development, - you gotta have a lot of boilerplate just to make the snippet run (after all, it should be at least viewable in browser, which is already a lot.) But you still can use this way of development with a moderate success (and depending on your managerial skill or self-control): the front-end developer would have to accommodate and internalize the fact, that snippets are to be written with more boilerplate, and after all, React is component based, and components are already snippets per se.

drakerossman··on ZincSearch – lightweight alternative to Elasticsearch written in Go
As it seems, it has near full compatibility with the Elasticsearch API. https://github.com/zinclabs/zinc/issues?q=is%3Aissue+elastic...