On 16 and 17 May 2026, the Zürich Friends of Nix hosted the eighth two-day ZHF event at the Eastern Switzerland University of Applied Sciences (OST) right next to Lake Zürich. These events are designed to encourage people to get to know each other, hack on everything Nix, and shape the future of open source together.
Event
The event took place in two large classrooms and the hallway connecting them. Thanks to the generous NixOS foundation sponsorship, we were able to provide food, drink, snacks, and coffee to our attendees as usual. We welcomed about 25 people on Saturday and almost as many on Sunday.
We kicked off Saturday with an introduction to the event and had quite a bit of content lined up!
- @john-rodewald welcomed the guests and explained the schedule
- @ners told us about the Institute for Digital Autonomy (IDA) that he is founding
- @Birdee gave a demo about nix-wrapper-modules
- @fricklerhandwerk showed us the nixpkgs security tracker
- @imincik called for people to attend this year’s Summer of Nix (applications are still open!)
- Andreas introduced the crowd to ZHF and how to contribute during the weekend
We had a productive hacking day, but had to move our culinary get-together to Sunday due to rain. Hacking continued on Sunday and we had a great barbecue and wok session.
We were so early to this ZHF that the release branch-off hadn’t even happened yet. Since the weekend, we opened 25 pull requests!
Acknowledgements
This event was made possible by Prof. Dr. Farhad Mehta (@fmehta), professor of informatics at the OST, by accommodating us in large, modern classrooms with a beautiful lake view.
Thanks to the event team (@ners, @das-g, and @john-rodewald) and all the other volunteers for helping us with food prep and making the weekend happen.
Thanks to @yayayayaka and @jopejoe1 for their hard work as the release managers for NixOS 26.05.
And of course, thanks to all the participants for coming!
Looking ahead
The next ZHF hackathon in Zürich will take place on 14-15 November 2026. For up-to-date information, check the Nix Zürich user group website.
You can also follow news shared on these channels:
- Zürich friends of Nix at meetup.com
- Nix Zürich Matrix room at #zurich:nixos.org
- Our sibling groups at Nix Bern and Nix Romandie
Find more Nix events in the NixOS Discourse Events category.
