kiara

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.

WHY 2025 was part of the International Festivals for Creative Applications of Technology (IFCAT) foundation’s quadrennial volunteer-led hacker camps, outdoors variants of the same tradition as the conventions by the German Chaos Computer Club.

While the event was hosted in the Netherlands’ Oudkarspel, the gathering was by no means domestic — in fact, strolling across the tents, one might just about conclude the event were hosted in Germany instead.

What best stood out at the event was the massive amount of work that went into organizing it, alongside its playful nature, with e.g. a sticker-clad beatbox robot carried around the site, and a literal fire wall 🔥.

Historically the Netherlands had been amenable to those testing the security of computer systems, with the domestic ‘hacking law‘ having been ratified only in 1993. Aside from the number of devices per attendee (allegedly at 1.5 — more often than not covered in stickers), local coverage of the event as such emphasized the activist roots of the scene, as forefighters of digital privacy, digital security, and digital autonomy.

And admittedly, despite the overwhelmingly white-collar crowd, the scene would strike one as at least adjacent to the anarchist culture one might usually find at squat cafes. This included for example its gender-non-conforming contingent (yours truly no exception), with a pond at the terrain having been marked on the event map as Gulf of Blahaj.

Moreover tho, there was its aforementioned emphasis on volunteers and self-sufficiency, which also makes for the core of the open-source software and hardware movements — while most food options available on-site were still commercial (with stands offering free fries/pancakes attracting long lines), one bigger tent erected within the event terrain functioned as an internal supermarket.

Given the side of the event one would generally only be able to experience part of the event’s 100-ish locations including a party stage, hardware modding, an arcade hall (with part of the gaming machines in Japanese), a sauna, some geographic contingents, a volunteer-based chaos mail service delivering messages throughout the event(s) ‘at the speed of chaos’, a karaoke bar, a ‘USA refugee camp’, a dancing space, halls hosting several tracks covering workshops, talks and entertainment, pyrotechnics show symphony of fire (😻) featuring tesla coils to play music from the likes of Mega Man, Nirvana, Super Mario, ACDC, Star Wars and Batman — as well as, most relevant for our purposes, a NixOS tent (courtesy of @lassulus).

Aside from getting to see new and familiar faces again, this also gave me the opportunity to meet Clan’s @hsjobeki to discuss challenges on Nix GUIs, get valuable advice on technical architecture from @raitobezarius, get a sense of what other Nixers were hacking on, borrow a tent for my stay (thanks @arianvp! 🙏).

Halfway through my stay also marked the filing of NixOS’s contracts RFC, offering me something to further review and hack while building upon our earlier efforts from ZHF 25.05, in a setting that allowed me to gather some feedback from other Nixers there as well. I’ve personally been kind of exciting about this development, which would expand not just what’s possible in NixOS, but I believe would offer an important step toward our long-term ambition of normalizing data portability for NixOS-based services as well.

Finally, the event also allowed us to run into some of the NLNet people to hang out and catch up.

While this was my first time at this line of events, I definitely ended up feeling right at home, and am looking forward to attend again in the future.

Over the weekend of May 24-25, Fediversity developers @fricklerhandwerk and me (kiara) congregated near Zürich to attend the NixOS 25.05 Zero Hydra Failure meetup & hackathon.

As it turns out, once the event hit, NixOS 25.05 had already been released, giving attendees the opportunity to focus on longer-term efforts — as well as just better getting to know one another.

At an initial round of lightning talks, I got to give a quick overview of our project, which ended up resulting in extensive feedback (thanks, @lorenz!).

With various parts of the (local) Nix community present there, we also managed to further engage on efforts such as the NixOS website, Vars, app-shell, and a PoC by @fricklerhandwerk and @ibizaman we felt quite proud of for Nix module interfaces.

We made use of the opportunity to do some planning on Fediversity as well, which together with the external feedback we’ll process further over the coming days to further refine our roadmap.

All in all, getting to sync up with our peers from the community again was pretty fun, and we feel excited for the improvements (and meetups!) ahead.

While the focus in our core tech stack for Fediversity is on Nix, to gain some inspiration from our fellow engineers, as a Fediversity engineer I (developer kiara) found the opportunity to attend Rust week as well, hosted at Kinepolis Jaarbeurs in Utrecht.

Rust week’s dates coincided with the anniversary of the language’s 1.0 release, despite its popularity just a decade earlier.

Activities offered a range of activities from talks to workshops, including both technical presentations and a more industry-oriented track.

The event kicked off with a keynote from Rust veteran Alex Crichton, giving a recap of progress over its life, describing the success we know it for today as owing to robust technical foundations such as its focus on safety, to its community, and its continual improvement.

Further talks highlighted language features, project learnings, as well as engineering philosophy and calls-to-action.

Coming from outside the ecosystem, I particularly enjoyed a talk on rewriting Vim in Rust, one on accessibility demonstrating a game of Tic Tac Toe playable using just audio and a keyboard, as well as a more light-hearted one on why not to try floating point hashing.

As a developer-oriented conference hosted at a cinema, the venue was further equipped with tongue-in-cheek Rust-oriented plays on blockbuster movies, and booths showcasing the offerings of various organizations active in this space. Merchandise such as the obligatory stickers prominently featured its cutesy mascot crustacean Ferris the crab. And in fact, a make-up artist offering glitter tattoos had various attendees lining up to get the mascot’s glittery likeness on the back of their hand.

Speaking of attendees, the event featured Rust enthusiasts from across the globe, with significant gender-diverse contingent included, making me feel all the more at home (as a trans person myself). All in all, it was great getting to meet like-minded engineers there, both new faces — as well as those I already knew from the Nix community.

While not as immediately relating to my day-to-day activities on Fediversity, I had a good time getting to see across the fence — and hope to still find a better opportunity to learn more.

Last but not least, I would like to give a shout-out to event sponsor flox for sponsoring my attendance.