My First Year As A Developer
I have been earning my bread by learning and developing using Nix since the beginning of last year, finding myself in a career that feels right. I’ve only stumbled upon programming and been using Linux for a couple of years. I am a builder by education and have worked in the construction industry for the past four summers, which is hard work. I don’t feel like I fit in there; I don’t like schedules, rules, or norms. I also studied for three years to become a construction engineer but dropped out due to the ridiculous mass hysteria. Well, despite these, I feel that I have never learned as much in my life as I did last year, even though I have attended schools. For this, I can thank Juuso Haavisto, who pulled me into this venture out of nowhere.
Ask yourself if you would be at the same job if it wasn’t about the money. If you answered no, maybe it’s time for a change.
Project N° 1
My first project was done under Ponkila Oy, Juuso’s firm. The project was HomestakerOS, a web front-end intended to offer a pre-configurable EL + CL Ethereum node as an ephemeral NixOS image. I started by transferring Juuso’s homestaking infrastructure to Nix to have something to work with. The project ended on 09/2023 and came up short since I had spent a lot of time at the beginning learning Nix, Git and Ethereum, something not so easy nor fast. Also, I was the only one writing the code for the most part. Don’t get me wrong, Juuso was very much involved and directed the project throughout, and we had a frontend developer working for us for a couple of weeks. Thanks to this project, I got to learn Nix full time while gaining a lot of basic knowledge about cryptocurrencies, especially Ethereum. I consider this to be very valuable information in our wonderful world of blockchain technology we have today.
Project N° 2
The second project, Nixie, which is now nearing its end, started right after the first one and is a bit more interesting to me. The management of the project was on par with the previous one, Juuso as the conductor and I as an arbitrary programmer. The goal of this project was to make PXE server configurations for the Nix operating system. This resulted in a module that simplifies the process of setting up and managing network-based boot environments. I won’t bother going into detail on this one. I suggest you go take a look at the showcase repository if you are interested. Heads up, Nixie is a closed-source project, so unfortunately, I cannot offer the source code. This was the wish of the project’s sponsor and owner, Juha Hulkko, whom I am also grateful to Juuso for being able to meet.
Conclusion
I think that both projects are mandatory steps and components in the overall picture that we have been painting as the projects have progressed. That’s a subject for another post, though. By the way, here is a fun little post I wrote when I was 6 weeks into the first project, called Learning the basics. I also started switching my own systems to NixOS after I got past the worst confusion and don’t regret it one bit; Nix is awesome. It started with the good old configuration.nix and hardware-configuration.nix, then came the home-manager and flakes, then started to switch to ephemeral systems, more on that later.
That’s it, that’s what I’ve been doing for just over a year. Trying to post more frequently, but most of my “front of screen” energy goes to other things right now.