If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together
— A proverb of unclear origin
We’re now heading into the sixth month of the Nix@NGI team’s collaboration, and things are moving steadily toward achieving our main goal: packaging as much NGI-funded software as we can so it’s convenient to use. As you’ve probably noticed, the team has ambitious, long-term plans. It’s an exciting and challenging project: we’re juggling multiple work streams at once while trying to navigate tricky constraints. Most of the team works part-time, which naturally affects our overall workflow. And we often can’t tackle our tasks directly, but moving the technical roadblocks out of the way is not our primary goal. Still, the team runs smoothly and we keep making progress — together.
Outreachy and Summer of Nix
- Starting in June, we’ll be joined by @themadbit, our Outreachy intern. Over the next three months, Mark will learn the internals of NGIpkgs, work on packaging and documentation, take part in all of the team’s processes. He’s just completed onboarding and merged the first few pull request. @eljamm is mentoring the internship. Thanks again to everyone who replied to our call for applications and made their first contributions to the Nix ecosystem!
- The 5th edition of Summer of Nix has started! We’re excited to announce @Prince213 @ethancedwards @junestepp as participants, who will be mentored by @eljamm, @julienmalka, and @erictapen. This year, we selected for experience with working on Nixpkgs, aiming to give back to those who have already contributed significantly. The result: We had many very strong candidates and the team had to take tough decisions. We saw a spark in every candidate we interviewed, but due to budget and bandwidth constraints, unfortunately we could only accept three participants. Great many thanks to everyone who took the time to prepare and apply! We hope to see all of you around Nix and maybe meet again next Summer of Nix.
Team updates
- @imincik, together with @eljamm, has been working on a GUI demo project aimed at helping Ubuntu, Debian, and Arch users new to Nix try out new software. The biggest challenge is showing users one clear path to get started, without overwhelming them with choices upfront. Regular readers of our updates may remember that the team has also been working on a demo for services (#614), which is now complete.
- @imincik also keeps eye on the overall shape of our issue tracker to help the team manage the complexity of the project, and leads regular planning and backlog grooming meetings.
- @erictapen is currently wearing two hats. One is familiar: UX designer for the NGI@Nix team. The other is newly reactivated-university student, now immersed in thesis work. Despite her academic commitments, she’s staying involved: joining office hours, and delivering thoughtful UI improvements across multiple projects, and evaluating the Summer of Nix applications.
- @eljamm has done a massive job coordinating Summer of Nix applications and the Outreachy program, while also working on automated tests for the application demos. He also packaged the GNU Taler 1.0 release for NixOS.
- @infinidoge and @OPNA2608 are currently focusing on packaging tasks:
- Inventaire is getting close to a working build
- Galène got plugin support for text-to-speech and file transfers
- #Seppo! now works on Nix, but still needs a bit of time to get ready for upstreaming to NixOS
- @erethon continued with getting Grist ready to deploy to official NixOS infrastructure, which requires an identity provider such as Dex for authentication. He’s meeting regularly with the infra team to integrate the additions with the existing setup. Also concluded sending out the project author survey in coordination with @erictapen — we already got ca. 80 responses and the first requests for getting mentoring and support by @julienmalka.
- @wamirez has been handling a lot of behind-the-scenes administrative work, such as supporting Summer of Nix mentors by brushing up applicant data for review and preparing the contracts for participants.
- @fricklerhandwerk continuously coordinates the team’s efforts from a global perspective and ensures we’re aligned with the project’s roadmap. He oversees formal tasks and obligations that keep us within the framework of the NGI initiative, providing essential structure while letting the rest of the team focus on their day-to-day work.
- Thanks to the 25.05 ZHF Hackathon in Zurich, @fricklerhandwerk and @imincik met in person, and also had a fruitful exchange on modeling composable services with @ibizaman.
Your questions, answered
Have something to discuss? We have office hours every Tuesday and Thursday from 15:00 to 16:00 (Europe/Berlin time). If you’d like to connect, discuss something you’d like to work on, or bring up something else, you’re very welcome to drop in.
Join us in our public NGIpkgs Matrix room – ask questions, share your ideas, or just say hello.
All project details, ongoing discussions, and contributions are tracked on our GitHub project board.
The Nix@NGI team is part of a coordinated effort to support selected FOSS projects, by making them available as Nix packages or NixOS service modules.This work is funded by the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiative through the NLNet Foundation and the NixOS Foundation.