NixCon 2022

Improving Nix documentation
2022-10-21 , Main track (Gym)

Documentation has always been a sore point for Nix, and the 2022 community survey results have clearly shown demand for improvement. This talk reports on this year's proceedings in better documenting the Nix ecosystem.


The talk outlines
- what the problems with learning Nix have been in the past
- what we have done this year to address them
- a vision for the near-to-mid-term future
- what you can do to help.


Do you allow your talk to be recorded? – yes What level of experience in Nix is the talk addressed to?

Beginner

While switching careers to software engineering after years in education, film making and graphics design, Valentin got into Nix and NixOS on his never-ending endeavor of making computers work reliably in the long run. He had been an active member of the Nix community as @fricklerhandwerk before joining Tweag in 2022, helping newcomers, sharing knowledge, and contributing code fixes and clarifications of the documentation one pull request at a time.

Sponsored by Tweag, this year Valentin has been working on improving to the Nix onboarding experience, has founded and led the Nix documentation team to attack larger issues in the ecosystem, and helped Summer of Nix 2022 participants to accommodate their numerous contributions.