Sixth annual blog reflection

Today, it is my blog's sixth anniversary. As usual, this a good opportunity to reflect over last year's writings.

Disnix

Similar to last year, many of this year's blog posts have been covering Disnix-related aspects. In January, I released version 0.5 of Disnix, wrapping up most of the new functionality I have developed in the last months of 2015.

After releasing Disnix 0.5, I have been working on revising its architecture to provide the concept of containers, so that it became possible to deploy databases to multiple DBMS instances hosted on the same machine. Also, the notational conventions used in the Disnix infrastructure models have become much more structured.

In addition to the container concept, I modified Disnix in such a way that it can treat deployed services as containers, so that they become deployment targets for newly deployed services. Previously, it was required to deploy containers by other means first. With these new changes, complex Disnix deployments can now fully manage themselves.

Furthermore, I made some small adjustments so that Disnix can be used as a remote package deployer and I have extended the prototype Dynamic Disnix framework with new features to support state deployment and automatic port assignments to services. Most of these new features have become part of Disnix 0.6, released in June 2016.

node2nix

Another major accomplishment is my Nix/NPM integration work. I have (again!) reengineered my npm2nix fork to support NPM flat module installations.

Moreover, I rebranded my npm2nix fork into node2nix, integrated it into Nixpkgs (replacing the old npm2nix generated set of packages), and extended it with support for simulating NPM global package installations so that Node.js-related build tools, such as Grunt, can be conveniently used within the Nix ecosystem.

Nix/NixOS

Similar to previous years, I also did some general Nix/NixOS work -- I have modified Dysnomia (that used to be companion tool for Disnix) to integrate it with NixOS, so that it can also do state deployment on system level.

I also did some Nix promotion work. In March, I was invited to give a talk about Nix/NixOS at a Ruby-related conference. In this talk, I elaborated about Nix's declarative deployment properties.

Furthermore, I wrote a blog post explaining Nix's push and pull distribution mechanisms.

Miscellaneous stuff

Besides Nix/deployment-related work I have also written a blog post about integrating Node.js-style callback and Promise/A-based invocation patterns in JavaScript and a porting strategy providing XMPP messaging functionality to mobile apps using the Titanium framework.

Finally, in my Christmas break, I have been playing around with an old gaming project and wrote about my experiences.

Blog posts

Like all my previous reflections, I will publish the top 10 of my most frequently read blog posts. Surprisingly enough, not much has changed compared to last year:

1. On Nix and GNU Guix. Still remains my most popular blog post since 2012 and it appears that it is still attracting quite a few visitors.
2. An evaluation and comparison of Snappy Ubuntu. Still remains my second most popular blog post attracting almost as many visitors as the previous blog post.
3. Managing private Nix packages outside the Nixpkgs tree. This blog post is a practical hands on tutorial targeting Nix beginners. It has now moved to the third place and it seems to be quite frequently consulted.
4. Setting up a multi-user Nix installation on non-NixOS systems. This blog post also remains quite popular since 2014 and demonstrates that this area in the Nix user manual is still open for improvement.
5. An alternative explanation of the Nix package manager. Has slightly dropped in popularity, but is still frequent read.
6. Yet another blog post about Object Oriented Programming and JavaScript. This JavaScript-related blog post still remains incredibly popular. It now seems that I have become (sort of) an authority in explaining the prototype inheritance concept.
7. Asynchronous programming with JavaScript. Another JavaScript-related blog post that remains popular, although I have no idea why.
8. Composing FHS-compatible chroot environments with Nix (or deploying Steam in NixOS). Popular, but gradually dropping in popularity.
9. On NixOps, Disnix, service deployment and infrastructure deployment. This is the only blog post that was not in last year's top 10. I am actually quite happy to find out that there is an increasing amount of people taking interest in both NixOps and Disnix.
10. Using Nix while doing development. An explanation blog post that is still popular but gradually dropping in popularity.

Conclusion

I am still not out of ideas yet, so please stay tuned, because there will be more next year! The only thing I would like to say is:

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!!!!