Latest · September 2, 2026 Keeping one version of everything After the last post introduced the holy grail of version ranges for nixpkgs, @arianvp over X felt it was a doomed endeavor: “What happens when a plan spans revisions and you accidentally load two versions of the same library? DOOMED.” 💀 Read →

2026 41 posts

• Sep 01 The holy grail of nixpkgs: version ranges
• Aug 31 How safe is follows?
• Aug 28 One flake to rule them all
• Aug 25 Stamping build info in constant memory
• Aug 24 Actually Queryable Executables
• Aug 23 Your executable is a SQLite database
• Aug 19 Three ways to smuggle SQLite into Nix
• Aug 17 nixpkgs-multiverse: the fewest nixpkgs
• Aug 16 DEFCON34 wrap-up
• Aug 14 nixpkgs-multiverse: fast mode
• Aug 11 nixpkgs-multiverse is audacitymaxxing
• Aug 09 nixpkgs-multiverse: every version that ever existed
• Aug 05 Super Mario Derivations
• Aug 01 A C++ toolchain from 357 bytes, in Bazel
• Jul 30 The Nix sandbox is a hidden input
• Jul 30 Nix finally has a source-bootstrapped OpenJDK
• Jul 29 Guix by Nix
• Jul 27 The mean means nothing
• Jul 26 Seriously, what is the large code-model even for?
• Jul 26 Small site changes and new design
• Jul 20 Linux kernel will support $ORIGIN, sort of
• Jul 18 How to piss off your Nix friends
• Jul 09 Who does Anubis actually stop?
• Jun 29 A TacoSprint 2026 Retrospective
• Jun 25 GuixPkgs: every Guix package, as a Nix flake
• Jun 22 Hijacking ELF entry points for NixOS compatibility or WTF is wrap-buddy?
• Jun 21 Nix needs relocatable binaries
• Jun 21 nix-build in under 100 lines
• Jun 15 A trillion dollars
• Jun 08 Relocatable Derivations
• Jun 05 The Guix Nix Abomination: Leveraging Guix derivations in Nix
• Jun 01 Every byte matters
• May 31 AI is a Boon for the Anal-Retentive
• May 23 Leaving performance on the table
• Mar 27 Does anyone actually use the large code-model?
• Mar 07 Nix is a lie, and that's ok
• Feb 18 Linker Pessimization
• Feb 11 Creating massively huge fake files and binaries
• Feb 03 Crazy shit linkers do: Common Data (COMDAT) sections
• Jan 30 Crazy shit linkers do: Relaxation
• Jan 01 Bespoke software is the future

2025 42 posts

• Dec 30 Huge binaries: papercuts and limits
• Dec 29 Huge binaries: I thunk therefore I am
• Dec 28 Huge binaries
• Dec 26 Failing interviews
• Oct 29 Nix derivation madness
• Oct 07 Fuzzing for fun and profit
• Sep 09 Bazel Knowledge: Smuggling capabilities through a tarball
• Sep 05 Writing a protoc plugin in Java
• Sep 02 Bazel Knowledge: Testing for clean JVM shutdown
• Aug 27 Bazel Knowledge: dive into unused_deps
• Aug 17 Using Nix as a library
• Aug 11 GitHub Code Search is the real MVP
• Aug 10 Angle brackets in a Nix flake world
• Jul 28 Bazel Knowledge: Mixing and matching how to build third_party is lunacy
• Jul 15 Bazel Knowledge: Beyond _deploy.jar for OCI images
• Jul 08 Bazel Knowledge: transition with style
• Jul 07 home-manager is a false enlightenment
• Jul 02 Nix S3 multi-user woes
• Jun 22 Bazel's Original Sins
• Jun 15 Bazel Knowledge: Homonymous Bazel Modules
• Jun 10 Bazel Knowledge: Diagnostic messages only on failure
• May 26 Linux cgroup from first principles
• May 22 Bazel Knowledge: Recursive Bazel for testing
• May 20 Bazel Knowledge: A practical guide to depset
• May 14 Bazel linux-sandbox and cgroups
• May 08 Bazel cgroup memory investigation
• May 07 Chaining Nix stores for fun
• Apr 02 Nix that looks like Bazel
• Mar 28 What's in a Nix store path
• Mar 27 Nix vanity store paths
• Mar 23 Nix derivations by hand
• Mar 12 Nix Dynamic Derivations: A lang2nix practicum
• Mar 11 Nix Dynamic Derivations: A practical application
• Mar 10 An early look at Nix Dynamic Derivations
• Mar 08 Demystifying Nix's Intensional Model
• Mar 03 404s and updated CSS
• Feb 28 Jekyll Git commit
• Feb 28 Nix migraines: NIX_SSL_CERT_FILE
• Feb 26 Nix pragmatism: nix-ld and envfs
• Feb 02 Nix: string interpolation of directories gone awry
• Jan 28 Bazel: Build Event Protocol Viewer
• Jan 12 Bazel Knowledge: Be mindful of Build Without the Bytes (bwob)

2024 26 posts

• Dec 18 Faking incremental Docker loads
• Nov 28 Bazel Knowledge: Protobuf is the worst when it should be the best
• Nov 08 JVM boot optimization via JavaIndex
• Oct 29 Bazel Knowledge: What's an Interface JAR?
• Oct 23 Bazel Knowledge: mind your PATH
• Oct 13 Bazel Knowledge: Aspects to generate Java CLASSPATH
• Sep 26 Bazel Knowledge: reproducible outputs
• Sep 25 Bazel Knowledge: Secret //external directory
• Sep 23 Bazel Knowledge: Reference targets by output name
• Aug 29 Bazel Overlay Pattern
• Aug 29 Bazel WORKSPACE chunking
• Aug 13 NixOS, Raspberry Pi & Me
• Jul 31 Automatic Nix flake follows
• Jul 29 Import but don't import your NixOS modules
• Jul 28 NixOS Option Inspection
• Jul 24 Management Time
• Jul 21 Scaling past 1 million ELF symbol relocations
• Jul 17 Fish the bash way
• Jul 12 Nix secrets for dummies
• Jul 10 Nix remote building with Yubikey
• Jul 05 Learn Nix the Fun Way
• Jul 02 Reproducibility in Disguise: Bazel, Dependencies, and the Versioning Lie
• May 03 Speeding up ELF relocations for store-based systems
• Mar 03 Visualizing GitHub workflow run length time
• Feb 27 Hermetic, but at what cost?
• Jan 14 Abusing GitHub as a PyPI server

2023 2 posts

• Sep 11 Quick insights using sqlelf
• Mar 19 sqlelf and 20 years of Nix

2022 3 posts

• Sep 12 Making RUNPATH redundant for Nix
• Mar 14 Shrinkwrap: Taming dynamic shared objects
• Jan 05 Computing all output paths for every attribute in Nixpkgs

2021 10 posts

• Sep 10 Using an overlay filesystem to improve Nix CI builds
• Sep 02 The yak shave for reproducibility
• Aug 12 A Nix Binary Cache Specification
• Aug 10 Investigating hydration times with Nix
• Aug 05 The search for a minimal nix-shell continued; mkShellMinimal
• Aug 02 A minimal nix-shell
• Jul 31 Eval the Nix
• Jun 27 Java, Nix & Reproducibility
• Jun 22 setting up a Nix Google Cloud Storage (GCS) binary cache
• Mar 13 JRuby and Sorbet

2020 23 posts

• Dec 01 autopatchelf - what it can look like
• Nov 17 On-demand linked libraries for Nix
• Nov 12 Debugging a JNR-FFI bug in Nix
• Nov 10 Isolation using Java's ClassLoader
• Oct 20 Nix parallelism & Import From Derivation
• Sep 28 nix-copy-closure your nix-shell
• Sep 23 VPNs continued
• Sep 20 VPNs from first principles
• Sep 17 Tailscale is magic; even more so with NixOS
• Sep 08 NixOS; what's in a rebuild? Continued.
• Sep 06 NixOS; what's in a rebuild?
• Sep 04 mvn2nix; welcoming Maven into Nix's warm embrace
• Sep 02 quassel core on NixOS with Let's Encrypt
• Sep 02 nix coercion trick
• Aug 11 caching your nix-shell
• Jul 20 Packaging a Maven application with Nix
• Jul 18 what is bundlerEnv doing?
• Jul 15 setting up a Nix S3 binary cache
• Jun 08 my love letter to redo
• May 31 Containers from first principles
• Apr 12 bpf_helpers and you...
• Apr 02 Parallel Task Execution
• Mar 31 New blog. New format.