Seventh annual blog reflection

Today, it is my blog's seventh anniversary. As with previous years, it is a nice opportunity to reflect over last year's writings.

Nix expression generators

As usual, the majority of my work is Nix related. This year, a substantial amount of my time was spend on the development of several kinds of Nix expression generators.

In the first quarter of the year, I improved node2nix's accuracy by implementing a more robust version pinning strategy to prevent NPM from consulting external sources. I also gave a talk about node2nix's state of affairs at FOSDEM 2017, attracting quite a large audience.

In addition to node2nix, I revived a number old PHP projects, modernized them a bit and developed composer2nix that can be used to automatically generate Nix expressions from composer (a package manager for PHP projects) configuration files. Similar to node2nix I have developed PNDP: an internal DSL for Nix in PHP to make the code generation process more robust and reliable.

I later unified some of the generation concepts of node2nix and composer2nix and extended both NiJS (an internal DSL for Nix in JavaScript) and PNDP (an internal DSL for Nix in PHP) to support custom object transformations, making the code of both generators much cleaner and better maintainable.

Finally, I had to make a substantial revision to node2nix to support NPM 5.x's content-addressable cache that conflicts with Nix's purity principles.

Disnix

In addition to the Nix expression generators, I have also released a new major version of Disnix in March: version 0.7.

For this new version, I have developed a new abstraction layer implementing multi-process programming patterns to improve the performance of certain deployment activities and to make the code more readable and better maintainable.

Another major feature addition is a deployment configuration reconstructor. Disnix deployment is centralized and when the coordinator machine disappears, a system can no longer be reliably upgraded. With the reconstructor, it is possible to recover from such failures.

Contrary to 2015 and 2016, I did not do as much Disnix development this year. Apart from these two major feature additions, I only did a couple of maintenance releases.

Other Nix features

I have also developed an NPM package providing an API that can be used to remotely control a Hydra server, a Nix-based continuous integration service, and a command-line client to demonstrate its possibilities.

Web technology

Besides Nix-development, I made a brief journey back in time to a technology area that I used to be very interested in (years ago) before I got involved with anything Nix-related and my research: web technology.

I used to develop a custom web framework around that time. I already published some pieces of it in 2014. In the middle of this year, I have isolated, documented and released the remaining parts. I also developed a number of simple example applications to demonstrate how the framework's features can be used.

In the process, some memories of the past resurfaced and I wrote an essay to reflect over them.

One of my not-so-strong points when it comes to web technology is anything layout and style related. I did a small investigation and wrote a checklist of minimalistic layout considerations for myself.

Mobile app development

I also wrote a blog post about the Model-View-Controller (MVC) paradigm and considerations while extending the company's product with chat functionality.

Blog posts

Like every year, I will publish the top 10 of the most frequently read blog posts so far:

1. On Nix and GNU Guix. This blog post is still the most popular for five years in a row. It seems that there are still plenty of people out there who want to know the differences. However, it appears that its position can soon be overtaken by the number 2.
2. Managing private Nix packages outside the Nixpkgs tree. This blog post is a tutorial written for Nix-beginners and seems to have grown quite considerably in popularity. It may soon become my most popular blog post.
3. An evaluation and comparison of Snappy Ubuntu. Still popular, but gradually dropping. I believe this can be attributed to the fact that Snappy has not been in the news for quite a while.
4. Setting up a multi-user Nix installation on non-NixOS systems. As with previous blog reflections, this post remains popular and still shows that this is an area open for improvement.
5. Yet another blog post about Object Oriented Programming and JavaScript. Was in last year's top 10 and remains popular. It appears that I did a fairly good job explaining the prototypes concept.
6. An alternative explanation of the Nix package manager. This blog post has also been in the top 10 for the last five years. It is gradually dropping in popularity. I still believe that it is important to have a good Nix package manager explanation recipe.
7. On NixOps, Disnix, service deployment and infrastructure deployment. This blog post was also in last year's top 10 and still popular. It is good to observe that people take interest in both NixOps and Disnix.
8. Asynchronous programming with JavaScript. A JavaScript-related blog post that remains popular.
9. The NixOS project and deploying systems declaratively. This is the only blog post that was not in last year's top 10. It seems to have quite some impact, in particular the corresponding presentation slides.
10. Composing FHS-compatible chroot environments with Nix (or deploying Steam in NixOS). Is still popular, but I expect this one to disappear from the top 10 next year.

Some thoughts

I am quite happy with the blog posts I produced this year, yet I have a few observations and ideas for next year to improve upon.

In the middle of this year, I had a significant drop in my blogging productivity (as may be observed by checking the publishing dates on the panel on the right). This drop was caused by a variety of things I will not elaborate about. It took me quite a bit of effort to get back into my usual rhythm and get another story published. This is something I should look after next year.

Another thing I observed by looking at my overall top 10 is that all blog posts except the 10th (about FHS-compatible chroot environments) were written for educational purposes. This year, I have not published any blog posts with education in mind. This is also something I should focus myself a bit more on next year.

Finally, the fact that I did not do so much Disnix development, does not mean that it is finished or that I am out of ideas. I still have a huge list of things that I would like to explore.

Conclusion

I'm still not out of ideas, so stay tuned! The final thing I'd like to say is:

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!!