chmod 105

Just in the Nix of time

July 17, 2024·

Embark in an unconventional open source journey with Pol Dellaiera ( poldellaiera ) in episode 5 of the chmodcast. It all starts with saving every euro to buy his first computer as a kid… Then it goes to Drupal, Symfony, and now Nix, where Pol’s contributions as a maintainer with commits rights make the lives of PHP developers easier than ever. Package manager, operating system and even functional language: Nix does it all. Let’s dive in!

00:20 — Episode introduction
01:45 — SymfonyCon Brussels
03:00 — Introducing Pol Dellaiera
05:03 — A love for computers that leads to a career in IT
08:31 — Open source journey, from Drupal 5 to Symfony to Nix
18:31 — Installing NixOS and saving configuration files
21:45 — Maintaining and adding packages to Nix
24:20 — Nix language
26:36 — Example of a contribution to Nix
30:33 — How many people work on Nix?
32:43 — How to use and contribute to Nix?
34:40 — What’s in the future for Nix? (Flakes!)
37:33 — Silly questions time!
41:10 — Next episode teaser

Thank you to Pol for taking us on his journey, but it doesn’t end there! He just published his master’s thesis about “Reproducibility in Software Engineering”, 20+ years after completing his bachelor’s degree! Check out the links below to learn more about Pol’s ongoing projects and stay in the loop with his work.

Mastodon (https://mathstodon.xyz/@pol)
GitHub (https://github.com/drupol)
Blog (https://not-a-number.io)
Master’s thesis “Reproducibility in Software Engineering” (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12666899)
Nix & NixOS (https://nixos.org/)

Do you have an open-source story of your own that you want to share? Join us for an episode of Change Mode, apply now to be a guest (https://forms.gle/56X2fMxdEJbDRXZD6) .

Shout out to our incredible podcast host, Marine Gandy ( mupsigraphy ), our resident Drupal expert and DevRel Engineer at Platform.sh. There’ll be plenty more from Marine coming soon, stay tuned!

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Last updated on July 17, 2024