Intro

In the beginning of June 2021, I started tinkering with NixOS on an old laptop (my beloved Samsung Ativbook 9+ from 2011). Many users on Hacker News had expressed that it was a paradigm shift and that the OS had completely rewired their understanding and wants of a modern OS. It had peaked my interest.

With a couple of afternoons' worth of tinkering, I managed to produce a configuration that had:

  • terminal utilities
  • dotfiles for vim, tmux, zsh
  • gtk theme
  • steam
  • custom keyboard bindings (US layout with an AltGr layer: ; - ö, ' - ä, [ - å)

It wasn't much, but having one place to configure my whole system felt really powerful, like dotfiles on steroids. Along with idea of direnv + nix packages for developer environments, it was enough to get me hooked.

Fast-forward a month, and I've just now wiped my work pc and installed NixOS on it. I've officially converted and will be spending my private and work time on a NixOS-based device.

I still haven't grokked the Nix language, but even so it's gone okay. I'm not at a level where I can write fluently, but the language is intuitive enough that I can "build legos" with all the snippets I find online.

Resolution

My career in software is still in its infancy, but with the last year of remote work in a large team I have learned a big lesson: I suck at communicating effectively. I can communicate well, but I am prone to use too many words.

The primary goal of this website will therefore be to train myself in communicating effectively. Meanwhile, I hope to learn by teaching, spread knowledge, and provide guidance to those who follow in my footsteps.

Here's to a year full of learning!