Plurrrr

While it’s easy to fall in love with Nix and want to use it to build and configure just about everything, let’s face it: few of us are in a position to do so, especially in the workplace. “Hey team, let’s Nixify our entire stack!” is unlikely to endear you to your coworkers at daily standup. Fortunately, Nix is good at enough things that you can reap many of its potential benefits by incorporating it into only a subset of an already existing software pipeline.

In this post, I’ll provide a concrete example of this by using Nix inside a fairly standard DevOps pipeline that builds Docker images and deploys them to Kubernetes in CI. Nix does a lot of heavy lifting in this scenario but it doesn’t do everything: it doesn’t stand up any infrastructure and it doesn’t handle deployment. That’s all left to popular, trusted tools and platforms from outside the Nix universe. I hope that this example inspires you to find ways to incrementally introduce Nix into your own stacks.

I’ve always been intimidated by coding techniques: encryption and decryption, hashing operations, error correction codes, and even compression and decompression techniques. It’s not that I didn’t know what they do, but I often felt that I never quite understood the basics, let alone had an intuitive understanding of how they worked.

Reed-Solomon forward error correction (FEC) is one such coding method. Until the discovery of better coding techniques (Turbo codes and low-density parity codes), it was one of the most powerful ways to make data storage or data transmission resilient against corruption: the Voyager spacecrafts used Reed-Solomon coding to transmit images when it was between Saturn and Uranus, and CDs can recover from scratches that corrupt up to 4000 bits thanks to the clever use of not one but two Reed-Solomon codes.

The story so far: At the end of the 1980s, Acorn Computers was at a crossroads. A small team, led by Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber, had invented a powerful new computer chip, the Acorn RISC Machine (ARM). Acorn released a new computer line, the Archimedes, that used these ARM chips. But the world wasn’t beating a path to the company's door.