LabCraft: a hands-on Nix course built around real failures

Hi everyone,

I’m Anand, and I’m building LabCraft - a hands-on learning platform for infrastructure and systems tools. I’m starting with Nix/NixOS because it’s been a big part of my own learning path over the past six years, and because I’ve seen how hard it can be to onboard people.

I wrote up the thinking here:

The course is opening in small batches while I settle the VM capacity, checks, and content. I’d especially value feedback from people who have taught Nix, onboarded a team to it, or watched people bounce off it.

What were the points where people actually got stuck?

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It looks neat though I kinda wanted to see more examples of what the examples/tests would look like.

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Thanks for the feedback @ahoneybun. Working on getting that up and running soon. If you sign up for early access, you should get an email as soon as I am able open lab access, most likely by next week.

Looking forward to it @anandsuresh !

Quick follow-up from the LabCraft intro thread: one Nix-specific course-design question felt worth splitting into its own topic rather than burying here.

I’m asking whether beginner-facing LabCraft material should teach the classic CLI first (nix-shell, nix-env, nix-store) or the modern CLI first (nix shell, nix search, nix path-info, flakes enabled), with the other shown as translation context.

New thread here.

I’d especially value feedback from people who have taught or onboarded new Nix users.