Plurrrr

For the past month or so, I’ve been experimenting with Nits, a different approach to NixOS deployments that is pull rather than push-based. And as part of that effort, I needed to address how exactly I would push NixOS system closures to the machines under management.

Typically, in a push-based deployment approach, you can copy the system closure directly via SSH whenever you’re deploying. But with Nits, the agent process running on the target machine needs to be able to connect and download the latest closure on demand, sometimes days or weeks after the deployment was triggered.

“Use a Binary Cache”, I hear you say. And yes, I did. But instead of spinning up an instance of Harmonia, configuring an S3 Bucket or hitting up Domen over at Cachix, instead, I decided to roll my own.

Hi! This is an explorable explanation of Python dictionaries. This page is dynamic and interactive — you can plug in your data and see how the algorithms work on it.

There has been confusion about the distinction between errors and exceptions for a long time, repeated threads in Haskell-Cafe and more and more packages that handle errors and exceptions or something between. Although both terms are related and sometimes hard to distinguish, it is important to do it carefully.