This year’s NixCon was held in Rapperswil-Jona, near Zürich — known in the Nix community as the location of its biannual meet-up Zero Hydra Failures. As such, I managed to come better prepared this time, not having had to borrow laptop chargers this time. While the number of attendees and talks has been growing year over year, the event’s venue, Ostschweizer Fachhochschule, largely managed to accomodate the attending crowd.
The event further looked more professionally organized than last year’s still, with one new addition including the use of colored bracelets to tag your intent, some of which included wanting to learn more, wanting to teach, being open to hugs (!), and participating in the 🐝 bee game that served as an ice-breaker to get to know some more fellow Nixers. Merchandise available to attendees included the usual T-shirt and stickers, but hammers as well, with two highlights by Applicative Systems including @tfc’s booklet Nix Antipatterns and QR-based certified Nix user stickers, which could be claimed such as to provide a personal profile from public statistics for your linked GitHub account.
One of the great parts about seeing fellow Nixers is the ability to bounce ideas off of one another, and half-way through the opening ceremony @edef1c had helped me find out how to manifest files in modular function application, a sub-challenge to integrating SelfHostBlocks’ contracts with Clan’s Vars. On that topic, in @ibizaman’s absence I managed to further gauge community sentiment on his outstanding RFC — overall seemingly regarded as a step in the right direction. I got to explain a bit about this at a brief podcast interview there as well.
During my time there I got to meet new and familiar faces as well, among which former project colleagues @fricklerhandwerk and @roberth (who did a presentation on NixOps4), as well as @erictapen of fellow NGI project NGIpkgs. It was cool getting to see some attendees who’d flown over from other continents as well, including steering committee members @gabriella439 and @winterqt — as well as the ever-present @adisbladis, who yet again presented on packaging Python projects rather than on his futuristically ergonomic portable computing set-up.
On a more serious note, the convention offered a wide range of interesting talks, with some personal picks including ones on sandboxing library jail.nix, automated fixing of build failures, OTA updates by systemd-sysupdate + systemd-repart, as well as on finit-based NixOS alternative finix. For those who weren’t able to make it to the event (or wished we didn’t have to choose among the four tracks on-site!), they offer recordings of the talks as well.
Once the talks were over, I had the opportunity (thanks again @refroni!) to attend a gathering organized by Flox and Numtide as well, which made for a nice opportunity to say hi to some more people. Overall, this community has definitely been maturing — and I’m looking forward to seeing everyone there again.