Since February I’ve been working on regaining my focus. It feels like something that used to come naturally but now takes deliberate action. With focus, I’m returning more to habits and systems of work I felt stronger about before the influence of the broader tech industry led me down a road of making concessions. I won’t pretend I don’t have to modulate self-doubt, but at least there aren’t any OKRs.

Lately

Nix Flakes

I started using Nix and NixOS in early 2020. This meant I was just a little bit early for the introduction of Nix Flakes. As a result my primary configurations have always been using the classic “channels” approach. To criminally under-summarize, Nix flakes introduce some standardized structure that improves both the composability and reproducibility of the Nix ecosystem.

It didn’t take long for the advantages of “the flakes way” to percolate into my brain enough that I started using flakes in smaller one-off projects (like this blog for example) but I was still carrying around legacy baggage for my most important use-cases (laptop and server configurations). That’s a shame, because flakes (while still experimental) are an obvious improvement over the status quo. Folks new to Nix are best served by skipping over the legacy world and moving right to flakes.

With more free time I finally got around to switching all of my legacy configurations to a flake based monorepo. In sum it was a super easy transition, even with Home Manager and some custom pinning in the mix. If you’re like me and have been holding off on making the switch you should take the plunge! It was less work than I expected and I’m really happy with the convenience of managing a single flake.lock file for all of my laptop and server configurations. I’d love to make my monorepo public but I still haven’t found a nice way to elide bits of configuration that aren’t runtime secrets favourable to sops-nix, but also feel icky to hang out in the open. If we know each other personally and you’re looking for more Nix resources feel free to reach out and I can add you as a collaborator.

deploy-rs

Of course, no migration is ever totally seamless.. While sketching out a transition to using Nix flakes I realized that the scheme I used to manage server configuration with NixOS needed to change too.

Historically I’ve used NixOps as a Nix-based approximation of other server configuration tools like Ansible. Using NixOps I could describe system/service configurations in Nix, build the closures locally, and ship the required parts of the Nix cache to remote systems. While it worked well for me initially it hasn’t aged gracefully. Development has mostly stalled and often the package is marked insecure, requiring annoying workarounds to use. Ultimately the breaking point was the weak flake support and missing documentation.

I’ve since switched to using deploy-rs and can’t say enough nice things about it. It was minimal work to adapt my existing configurations into a flake that deploy-rs could use to shuffle specific nixosConfigurations off to remote machines. Flake support is top notch, and the Rust based tooling has a much smaller system footprint than the Python based NixOps environment. It also uses a clever “dead-man’s switch” system to achieve magic rollback to a previous configuration generation if the new generation fails to activate cleanly.

Blightspell

It wouldn’t be a wood wide log update if I didn’t find a way to shoehorn in some MUD related content (see also carcinisation, slow-moving). In February I spent some time chasing the dream of a fancy spellchecking experience for Blightmud, my terminal MUD client of choice.

To achieve what I wanted I had to add a handful of new Blightmud features including:

• callback support for when unsent data in the prompt area changes.
• a new module for manipulating a “mask” for decorating unsent prompt data.
• a new low-level spellcheck module that offers bindings on top of hunspell.

With those features landing in Blightmud v5.1.0 it was possible to write Blightspell, a Lua plugin for Blightmud that implements real-time spellcheck. I’m really happy with the end result! If you’re a Blightmud user be sure to give it a try and let me know what you think :-)

Thinking about

• Miniflux - Until Google Reader was shutdown (RIP) I was a heavy user of RSS. Since Twitter is being turned into dogshit by an egomaniac I’ve come back to RSS as a way to stay on top of cool writing. Miniflux is a great self-hosted experience and it gets extra points being written in Go.
• Autosquash in Git - I’m no stranger to git rebase --interactive but learning about autosquash from Bob Vanderlinden’s blog has been a game-changer. Shout out to the developers that are meticulous about a clean and helpful git log - it’s rarer than you would hope. 💔
• Moving the Posts - this post from Drew Schuster’s blog lands squarely in the overlap of my continued interest in learning about the power grid and my experiences with system maintenance. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll bookmark.

Until next time