How to Learn Nix, Part 49: nix-direnv is a huge quality of life improvement

I made something that I think is pretty neat, and I want to tell you about it. This is a little hot air balloon made out of alternating layers of brass and bronze that lock together with these angled facets: It’s 3D printed, sort of, but it really is solid metal – it’s not a metallic filament. It’s made by “lost wax casting,” where you 3D print a...

You’ve probably seen this Python 101 thing before: @memoized def fib(n): if n 1: return n return fib(n - 1) + fib(n - 2) Leaving aside the absurdity of computing Fibonacci numbers recursively, it’s a common first introduction to Python decorators and higher-order functions. fib is just a function, and memoized takes that function and returns a...

Note: I wrote the vast majority of this post on August 24, 2022, but I decided that it was a whiny rant that I didn’t want to publish. I came across the draft in January 2024, remembered that this entire series is a whiny rant, and decided to publish it anyway. I’ve been a happy Nix user for about 18 months now, and– well, not happy happy, but...

When you think about the Fibonacci sequence, you probably imagine a swirling vortex of oscillating points stretching outwards to infinity: Okay, no, obviously you don’t. Yet. When you think about the Fibonacci sequence, you probably flush with a latent rage when you remember that it is, more often than not, the way that we introduce the concept...

I want to tell you about an idea that has had a huge influence on the way that I write software. And I mean that in the literal sense: it’s changed the way that I write software; it’s re-shaped my development workflow. The idea is this: you can write programs that modify themselves. And I don’t mean macros or metaprogramming or anything fancy...