Beaudan Campbell-Brown - Nix in a Nutshell
Melbourne Compose is the monthly in-person meetup for functional programmers in Melbourne, every 3rd Thursday of the month in Carlton.
Our September meeting will be 6:00-8:00 pm Thurs 17th of September at our regular venue, Activity Room 2 at Kathleen Syme Center in Carlton. Arrive from 5:30 for chat and socialising, talks start at 6:30pm. Please RSVP via Luma.
Beaudan Campbell-Brown - Nix in a Nutshell
Software development is hard. Decades of programming-language research have given us functional primitives and patterns that constrain the problem space, making whole categories of errors harder, or impossible, to express. Yet building and deploying software remains surprisingly fragile, as the proliferation of containers, lockfiles, virtual environments, and DevOps tooling suggests.
Nix applies these ideas to software builds and environments. Through a clever utilisation of cryptography and sandboxing, Nix treats the build process as close as practical to a pure function: given the same inputs, produce the same artifact.
This presentation will introduce how Nix works, what it is like to use in practice, and what becomes possible when development environments, binaries, containers, and even system configurations are all the product of declarative function composition.
As always, newcomers welcome. Contact Ben on 0407 990 094 if you need assistance finding us on the night.
Hope to see you there :)
-Ben Hutchison & John Walker