Plurrrr

In the last few years, there has been a renaissance in command-line utilities. If you are still using utilities written 30 years ago (groan) you will be in for a surprise. The functionality might be the same but the UX(or is it developer experience) is a million times better.

These are some of the best command line utilities I've come across, ones I highly recommend.

In short: in my experience, if a single programmer builds something, it’s often hard for others to maintain later. There are several possible reasons why. Even great programmers fall into this trap!

I've been following the Nix project for a while but now that I'm done with my PhD I finally have some free time and energy to try using it in earnest. This series is going to be me learning Nix by showing you how things work and how to put the pieces together.

For those of you unaware, Nix takes reproducible builds to their logical conclusion by making package builds (mostly) pure functions of their dependencies. The binary artifacts of builds are stored in a content-addressed store (the Nix store) so you can be sure that you're always getting the same package if you have its name and hash. Not only can you build programs this way, but you can also build development environments ("I want these libraries available in my build environment and nothing else", for example), run commands in throw-away environments with specific packages installed without polluting your global environment. There's even an operating system, NixOS, based on this packaging system that allows you to configure your whole system (installed packages, system settings, etc) from a single file.