Nix derivations are nodes in a data structure. I challenged myself to use this Nix store in strange ways: can I model an airplane flight network as a Nix store graph and get it to answer questions about going from Singapore to Dublin? Can I store all of my chess game positions as nodes in my Nix store and use it to improve my chess game? Can I write a slideshow software where each slide is a Nix derivation that points to the next slide?

Join me to dive deep into polishing our Nix fundamentals: what are buildInputs vs runtime referencecs? What is lib.fix and what does it have to do with a popular venture capital firm? What does dontUnpack do? Why would anyone use ${derivation} in a string?

You are not going to get anything directly applicable from this talk. You may be infected by this disease I have where I try to model everything from project tracking to Git commits as derivations in a Nix store.

Nix's dependency model can be used for far more than just packages: Nix's dependency model is weirder, more powerful, and more fun than it looks.