2024 Summer of Nix program updates

Hello everyone, and welcome to Summer of Nix 2024!

My name is Valentin, and together with @mightyiam I organise the fourth edition of the northern-hemisphere summer program on behalf of the NixOS Foundation. Summer of Nix is a coordinated effort to support selected free and open source software (FOSS) projects, by making them available as Nix packages or NixOS service modules. It is funded by the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiative through the NLNet Foundation and the NixOS Foundation, this year with 135 000 EUR available for development.

Our mission is, as codified in our latest grant agreement with the European Commission:

Cross-platform reproducible packaging & distribution (NixOS)

To onboard new developers, service providers and end users, projects need both an up-to-date development & testing environment as well as turn-key software packages for deployment. We are unique in providing a common packaging solution based on Nix - across all previous and ongoing NGI Zero programmes and available to all other NGI programmes courtesy of the ongoing CSA NGI Zero Review. Nix is the next-generation vendor-agnostic package solution - one shared and reliable way of delivering software for Linux, Mac OS X and other Unix systems. Nix makes package management not only portable, transparent and reproducible – it has in fact more software packaged than any other software distribution in the world. We package all funded projects in a declarative, transparent and verifiable way. NGI Zero and the Nix community will also help organise three editions of the Summer of Nix. With Nix packaging applied horizontally across all NGI Zero programmes, this common packaging approach offers a smooth and efficient pathway to deployment.

More information on Summer of Nix and its role in the European Commission’s NGI program as well as last year’s proceedings can be found in the 2023 Summer of Nix thread. You can browse the reports from 2021, 2022, and 2023 and this year’s call for participants for details if you’re curious.

Goals

In the following months we’ll pursue the following goals:

Team

The application process has concluded mid May, with each team lead receiving around 70 applications. Thanks to everyone who got in touch, we had many more great candidates than could be accommodated!

This year’s team leads @Janik @jleightcap @JulienMalka selected a total of 12 participants from across the globe, who will soon get together to work on getting ever more software to run on a whim, and share knowledge on disciplined software development with Nix. @mightyiam has already been at it for a month with another 6 people working in two groups. In the past weeks, @lorenzleutgeb @erethon @wegank have been taking care of infrastructure, code organisation, and contributor documentation, to make it a smooth experience for this year’s participants and future contributors. I’ll be around to answer questions, support the group on administrative matters, and provide technical direction where needed.

Stay up to date

I will post (roughly) monthly updates in this thread. If you have any questions, feel free to ask them here or contact me in private messages.

Have a great Summer of Nix!

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Next week, Thursday 2023-06-13 12:00 UTC, @mightyiam and mob “cake” will stream an open mob programming session to give an impression of what’s happening on the technical side of Summer of Nix. This may be particularly interesting if you would like to:

  • learn more about remote mob programming
  • get a taste of disciplined software development with Nix and NixOS
  • peek behind the curtains of cutting-edge free and open source software
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