Nix Online Meetup

I’m planning on holding an online Nix meetup next week (the night of Wednesday, January 23rd for those in America). It should be an opportunity to hack on Nix-related stuff, as well as make some new friends in the Nix community.

More information can be found on the event page:

This is the first remote meetup I’ve held, so honestly I’m not sure how it will go. Hopefully everyone has a good time.

I’m interested in getting feedback about this from the community, so I have a couple questions.

  1. I’m using the Japanese site connpass.com to host the registration page for this event. Ideally I wanted something like Meetup.com but free. I think connpass.com should appear in English as long as your browser is setup correctly. Is anyone not able to view the site in English? (Is there a more well known event registration site that is used by people in the US/Europe?) Does connpass show you the time of the event in your local timezone? Or in Japan’s timezone? I’ll need to edit the registration page it if it doesn’t show the time in your local timezone. (I’ve changed the registration site from connpass.com to eventbrite.)

  2. I’m planning on using Skype to hold this first meetup, but I am not particularly tied to Skype for future meetups. Is there a better program to use for holding remote events?

  3. I limited the number of participants because I wasn’t sure how it would work out if many (15+ or so) people were participating. Does anyone have experience with this? Is there some sort of software that makes it easy to hold this sort of free-form online meetup where everyone can talk to each other?

  4. I set it up so the time should work for people from America. Here is the start time for American time zones:

    EST: Wednesday, 23 January 2019, 9:00 PM (UTC -5)
    PST: Wednesday, 23 January 2019, 6:00 PM (UTC -8)

    Is there anyone that would be interested in joining this event but can’t because of the time? Next time I could try to hold this event in a time that would work for people in Europe.

Let me know if you have any other questions / opinions.

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Sounds fun. You picked a great time for me so as long as I can get the kids to bed on time I should be there right from the start.

Several details of the meetup were only displayed in Japanese and Google translate was unable to translate the text for me.

Any more details on what the plan tio hack on might be? The more planned ahead of time the better.

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@aanderse Thanks for letting me know about the details only being displayed in Japanese. I decided to change the event registration site from connpass.com to eventbrite. Here’s the new registration site (although you don’t have to register again if you don’t want):

Nix Online Meetup Registration, Wed, Jan 23, 2019 at 9:00 PM | Eventbrite

Any more details on what the plan to hack on might be? The more planned ahead of time the better.

I tried to describe this on the event page, but I was thinking that everyone would decide something to work on on their own based on their skill level and interests. For instance, I have a quick follow-up to a PR I need to do. After that I was thinking about trying to implement a way to declaratively create NetworkManager system-connections configuration files for NixOS.

Although picking something to hack on together would also be a lot of fun. I’d definitely be interested if you have any good ideas.

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Just got finished this meetup. Not too many people showed up, but we had a good time and got a lot done. It was me, @aanderse, and John Wiegley.

I sent a PR changing the the way priorities for module aliases are propagated for the module system: lib/modules: Change mkAliasOptionModule to use the priority for the alias by cdepillabout · Pull Request #54528 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub. @aanderse also showed me how to get myself added to be able to use ofborg. I had also wanted to add a way to create NetworkManager system-configuration files with nix, but I didn’t get a chance to work on this.

@aanderse tried to fix up some of the stuff for the Apache and Redmine modules. He sent these two PRs: nixos/httpd: add options sslCiphers & sslProtocols by aanderse · Pull Request #53702 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub and redmine: add missing 'migrate' command prior to starting the application by aanderse · Pull Request #54524 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub. He also posted a short message about logrotate: NixOS 19.03 feature freeze - #6 by aanderse.

John was working on hnix. The hnix codebase was recently updated to use a newer version of the parsing library, megaparsec-7. The way error reporting is handled has slightly changed, so he was looking into fixing that: Error traces are no longer useful since switching to Megaparsec 7 · Issue #428 · haskell-nix/hnix · GitHub.

John also explained to us why direnv is so cool: https://github.com/jwiegley/notes/blob/master/README-direnv.md


I’m planning to try to hold an online meetup like this about once a month, so if this sounds interesting to you, please join the slack channel. I’ll definitely send a message here if I organize another event:

https://join.slack.com/t/nixremotemeetup/shared_invite/enQtNTI3MjkxNzgyMTk4LTNjMjczNDk1MmVjZjEyOWFhMTA3Mjc4Y2ViN2VhYzNkMjg4MmJhNWE1ZGYxZTRmOWY4Zjg3OWE0MWI1MDgxOTM

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Is there a recording of this?

I don’t know if it’s still a thing but I remember people using hangout to talk about Emacs and they used to publish a recording after the fact: tag - emacs-hangout :: Sacha Chua

No, there’s no recording of this.

I wouldn’t be opposed to someone recording it, but I don’t really have any interest in making/uploading recordings. The recording would have some long periods of no one talking, so I’m not sure how interesting it would be.

The recording would have some long periods of no one talking, so I’m not sure how interesting it would be.

I guess these periods would get smaller if the idea catches up and gains more participants; and if someone turns out to be interested in making the recordings, they will probably cut out the silence (I expect even an automated way of doing it to work OK-ish in hands of an experienced person who can choose detection parameters).

I wouldn’t be surprised if hangout would allow uploading to Youtube an unedited version with 1-click. I’m not sure but think Google is shutting down Hangout.

One other way would be to record with something supporting live streaming to youtube. People could watch it live and surely there’s a way to leave those videos on youtube.

maybe with: Learn how to Live Stream and Record on your Jitsi Meet Install - Jitsi