What is Nix and why you should try it
I can vouch for the immense improvement Nix has made to my software development process. I use NixOS on my desktop and laptop. At the OS-level, it gets a lot of things right: reproducible, immutable system configs; lightweight containers; devops with declarative configs. At a software project level, nix-shell is an indispensible tool. Compilers and interpreters aren&#x27;t even part of my system-wide config; instead each project has it&#x27;s own shell.nix file that installs all dependencies I need on the fly without polluting system state or virtualization. Nix is a god-send, and the developers that contribute to it are nothing short of awesome!<p>The area that needs improvement is the documentation. Once you learn the Nix language, reading the source code is pretty helpful, but it would be nice to make it more approachable. For example, the nixpkgs repo has a bunch of Nix helper functions that are useful to developers when writing their own packages, but these functions&#x27; documentation is either buried in a long manual, or non-existent.