Since I haven’t been active on the team since mid 2024, and since there’s little chance I’ll have enough time or energy to do anything substantial in at least the next half year around the Nix code base — today I formally resign as a Nix maintainer. This is mainly to set realistic expectations around my involvement. The primary reasons for my long absence are that around that time funding of my day-job time for working on Nix documentation ran out and that simultaneously I prioritised other responsibilities I took on around the ecosystem, such as running Summer of Nix and helping develop the (still prototype) Nixpkgs vulnerability tracker. That is to say: I’ll stick around.
@edolstra @roberth @ericson2314 @tomberek (and @thufschmitt who spearheaded the formation of the team) thank you all for the incredible opportunity of being part of this endeavor. It was lot of fun, and sometimes a lot of hard work. I’ve learned a lot, with and about all of you guys. I greatly appreciate the various strengths each of you bring that keep carrying the project against all odds.
Big thanks also to all contributors – be it fixing a typo or overhauling the Nix language reference like @rhendric did – for your patience and tireless support.
Great many thanks to Antithesis and Tweag for enabling me to work on Nix for almost two years. It made a big difference.
The two reports the team published during my time (2023, 2024) largely reflect what I consider successes and challenges of the Nix team. I’m particularly proud that we’ve managed to substantially reduce uncertainty around many questions, if only by merely writing things down. Technical documentation is only part of that, and despite some gaping holes and dark corners still left, I’m quite satisfied with the parts we’ve improved.
I think I was able to facilitate a few clarifications that now help us talk about certain problems in a more structured fashion. I hope that my work made more visible what’s otherwise invisible and, if nothing else, enabled others to learn from what went well and what didn’t.
We did make Nix better in those two years I took part, for sure. We did gain some focus as a team, and overall made it easier to contribute to Nix. Maybe not as much as I would have liked it. But Nix is, despite the elegant ideas underpinning it, is a surprisingly complex project with a long history. The code is hard to work with – we did a few things about that. And maybe I was too ambitious in what could be achieved in the given time. It’s a very pragmatic code base, and my tendency to approach things from first principles sometimes ran into the way of thinking ingrained into the implementation.
I always wished for more, but what allows me to nag about this or that today are the years of result-oriented work that brought Nix into existence. This is an extraordinary feat that cannot be underappreciated, and the fruits of which now feed many households. Thank you all for getting us there, and especially Eelco, who has been at it for much more than 20 years.
I fondly look back to countless long nights of inspiring discussion and hacking with @ericson2314 and @roberth, once in a while strategising with @tomberek, or the many team meetings we spent illuminating the history of Nix with @edolstra, asking many pointed questions. Thank you for bearing with me all the the time. Please excuse me if I ever pushed too hard.
The recent addition of @Mic92 to the team is a great step towards getting more people involved in maintaining and developing Nix, and seems quite natural given he’s one of the most senior and prolific contributors to the ecosystem. I wish you all only the best on the Nix journey, may it continue another 20 years!
