NixCon 2024

Nix as the Swiss Army Knife in Cloud Development Environments
2024-10-25 , Arena

In cloud-based development environments, flexibility and on-demand access to the right tools are essential. While many people think of Nix in terms of reproducibility, I use it in a different, somewhat weird way—to get exactly what I need, when I need it.

In this talk, I’ll demonstrate how Nix can be a "Swiss Army knife" in GitHub Codespaces, allowing me to manage complex development environments on the fly without much burden. This talk will use Codespaces as an example, but the same techniques can be applied to any remote environment.

Join me in a discovery of how Nix saved my day many times when contributing on many projects I don't normally work on.


This is an entry level talk. It's mostly to show that Nix can be used even in a simple way, without going too deep in its understanding.


What level of experience in Nix is the talk addressed to?

Beginners.

Do you allow your talk to be recorded? – yes

I'm a software engineer currently working at GitHub where I focus on continuous delivery and Kubernetes related topics. I am also the maintainer of the ExternalDNS project.