I am proud to announce a major Nix development program called “The Summer of Nix” that will happen this summer between August 2nd and October 15th.
The program’s goal: Assemble a team of beginner and advanced Nixers to learn together while doing useful work - all of this getting paid a nice stipend. The theme of this very first edition is about improving the packaging situation for free and open source software in Nix and it is fully funded by the European Comission via the NLNet and NixOS foundations. More information and how to participate can be found on summer.nixos.org. Applications are open now!
The program is a first for us, @garbas, @adisbladis, @Arsleust, @leenaars, @edolstra and myself who have been involved in the organization so far, and I believe it is also a first for the Nix community as a whole. Don’t hesitate to write us questions, ideas and suggestions about it to summer@nixos.org or as comment in this thread.
A last word about who I am: I work at Tweag, mostly in a coordinating role, and have heard about Nix the first time I entered the office about three years ago. Coming from academia from a “computationally assisted” domain with a lot of ad-hoc approaches to programming, I have been deeply impressed by its ideas and community, and truly believe that Nix can bring a lot of value to many people and fields of application. I am glad to see it mature and attract funding that makes projects like this possible. I hope that more will come.
I would 100% participate in this as a learner (I can get by with nix well enough but have much to learn!), but it’s not feasible living in the USA with a full-time job and your healthcare tied to it.
In case any Rust-savvy Nix-ers are considering this and looking for a proposal, crate2nix could use some love and the author appears willing to mentor as long as someone is willing to put in a serious push
I’m not totally sure something like this would be suitable, or if the Nix team are hoping for proposals that focus more on Nix/nixpkgs. That said, I would personally love to see something like crate2nix that does per-crate derivations (and hopefully speed up builds by sharing build artifacts for dependencies) take over the rustPlatform.buildRustPackage approach of doing a derivation per package. Maybe the investigation of such a merger could be part of the proposal?
Anyways, just an idea as I’m not sure I’ll have the time to apply myself.
Edit: Ahh disregard this, I thought that proposals for projects were a part of the application but it appears they are not - see comment below.
Ah my apologies, you’re totally right - I was under the impression you could propose some work that you were interested in being a part of for the summer of nix program too, but it does seem more generally focused on Nix and nixpkgs itself which makes sense. No doubt the project maintainers have a better idea of where help could be used anyway : ) Sorry for the confusion - not sure why I had that impression!
I had applied for Summer of Nix on 16 April 2021. I did not get any reply regarding the status of the application. I would like to know the status if it is possible. How can I get these details, please?
I am writing this update approximately one month after we announced the Summer of Nix program. At the time, we didn’t know what to expect as a reaction. We were uncertain who would actually apply, and therefore had only a rough idea on how the program would look like. We now have a much better view.
Our last month was filled with interviews: We have had a great time talking to so many long and short time community members. Nix users across plenty of time zones, students, professionals and retired software engineers. All wrote to us with enthusiasm, curiosity and energy which we really appreciated.
Truth is, we have received a lot more applications than originally anticipated. The program was laid out for a maximum of 30 participants and we received more than 80! This is really nice, of course, but also a pity because the bitter consequence is that we cannot include everyone.
With one eye sad and the other happy, we will therefore close the applications on May 15th.
ps: We are currently looking for a better place to make updates - not hidden as comment in a thread - and hope that we can do more of those after the application phase calms down.
