8th yearly blog reflection

Similar to previous years, I will reflect over last year's writings. Again the occasion is my blog's anniversary -- today, it has been exactly 8 years ago that I started this blog.

Disnix

In the first two months of this year, most of my work was focused on Disnix. I added a number of extra features to Disnix that are particularly useful to diagnose errors in an environment in which services are distributed over a collection of machines in a network.

I also revised the internals of Disnix in such a way so that it has become possible to deploy systems with circular dependencies, by dropping the ordering requirement on inter-dependencies, when this is desired.

Finally, I extended my custom web application framework's example applications repository (that I released last year) and made it a public Disnix example case, to provide a more realistic/meaningful public example in addition to my trivial/hypothetical examples.

The new features described in these three blog posts are part of Disnix 0.8, released in March this year.

Mendix

The biggest news of the year is probably the fact that I embarked on a new challenge. In April, I joined Mendix, a company that provides a low-code application development platform.

Since the moment I joined, there have been many things I learned and quite a few new people I got to know.

From my learning experiences, I wrote an introduction blog post to the Mendix platform, specifically aimed at people with an advanced programming background (as a sidenote: the Mendix platform targets various kinds of audiences, including users with a limited programming background).

At Mendix, the Nix project and its tools are still largely unknown technology. In the company, sharing learning experiences within the entire R&D team is generally encouraged.

Mendix already uses rivalling technologies to automate application deployments. As an exercise to learn the technical architecture of running applications better, I automated the deployment process of Mendix applications with the Nix package manager and NixOS making it possible to automatically deploy a Mendix application by writing a simple NixOS configuration file and running only a single command-line instruction.

I also presented the Nix automation process to the entire R&D department and wrote an article about it on the public Mendix blog. (I kept a transcription on my own blog for archiving purposes).

Nix

In addition to Disnix, and joining Mendix (where I gave an introduction to Nix), I did some general Nix-related work as well.

To improve my (somewhat unorthodox) way of working, I created a syntax highlighter for the Nix expression language for one of my favourite tools: the editor the comes with the Midnight Commander.

As a personal experiment and proposal to tidy up some internals in the Nix packages repository, I developed my own build function abstractions to mimic Nix's stdenv.mkDerivation {} function abstraction with the purpose to clearly identify and separate its concerns.

Later, I extended this function abstraction approach to tidy up the deployment automation of pluggable SDKs, such as the Android SDK, to make it easier to automatically compose SDKs with plugins and the corresponding applications that they build.

Finally, I experimented with an approach that can automatically patch all ELF binaries in the Android SDK (and other binary only software projects), so that they will run from the Nix store without any problems.

Some of the function abstraction techniques described in the blog posts listed above as well as the auto patching strategy are used in the revised version of the Android build infrastructure that I merged into the master version of Nixpkgs last week. Aside from upgrading the Android SDK to the latest version, these improvements make maintaining the Android SDK and its plugins much easier.

In addition to writing Nix-related blog posts, I did much more Nix related stuff. I also gave a talk at NixCon 2018 (the third conference held about Nix and its related technologies) about Dysnomia's current state of affairs and I released a new major version of node2nix that adds Node.js 10.x support.

Overall top 10 of my blog posts

As with previous years, I will publish my overall top 10 of most popular blog posts:

1. Managing private Nix packages outside the Nixpkgs tree. As I predicted in my blog reflection last year, this blog post is going to overtake the popularity of the blog post about GNU Guix. It seems that this blog post proves that we should provide more practical/hands-on information to people who just want to start using the Nix package manager.
2. On Nix and GNU Guix. This has been my most popular blog post since 2012 and has now dropped to the second place. I think this is caused by the fact that GNU Guix is not as controversial as it used to be around the time it was first announced.
3. An evaluation and comparison of Snappy Ubuntu. Remains my third most popular blog post but is gradually dropping in popularity. I have not heard much about the Snappy package manager developments in the last two years.
4. Setting up a multi-user Nix installation on non-NixOS systems. Is still my fourth most popular blog post. I believe this blog post should drop in popularity soon, thanks to a number of improvements made to the Nix package manager. There is now a Nix installer for non-NixOS systems that supports multi-user and single-user installations on any Linux and macOS system.
5. Yet another blog post about Object Oriented Programming and JavaScript. Still at the same place compared to last year. I noticed that still quite a few people use this blog post as a resource to learn more about prototypes in JavaScript, despite the fact that newer implementations of the ECMAScript standard have better functions (such as: Object.create) to manage objects with prototypes.
6. An alternative explanation of the Nix package manager. Remains at exactly the same spot compared to last year. It probably remains popular due to the fact that this blog post is my preferred explanation recipe.
7. On NixOps, Disnix, service deployment and infrastructure deployment. No change compared to last year. It still seems to clear up confusion to groups of people.
8. Asynchronous programming with JavaScript. Maintains the same position compared to last year. I have no idea why it remains so popular, despite many improvements to the Node.js runtime and JavaScript language.
9. Composing FHS-compatible chroot environments with Nix (or deploying Steam in NixOS). The popularity of this blog post has been gradually dropping in the last few years, but all of sudden it increased again. As a result, it now rose to the 9th place.
10. A more realistic public Disnix example. This is the only blog post I wrote in 2018. It seems that this public example case is helpful for people to understand the kind of systems and requirements you have to meet in order to use Disnix to its full potential.

Discussion

What you may have probably noticed is that there is a drop in some of my more technical blog posts this year. This drop is caused by the fact that I am basically in a transition period -- I still have familiarize myself with my new environment and it is probably going to take a bit of time before I am back in my usual rythm.

But do not be worried. As usual, I have plenty of ideas and there will be more interesting stuff coming next year!

The final thing I would like to say is:

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!