July 19, 2026

I've grown pretty fond of Nix over the past 6 months. It's awesome.

With AI everything (yes, I find it annoying as well), it is a great way to have declarative servers/deployments/services.

It's sold as a package manager, which it is, but that isn't a very good description in my opinion. In reality it is more of a system manager. You can define a whole system. You should read about it or just ask AI about it for why it is so great.

• Most if not all packages are already defined in Nix, but it is pretty easy to wrap an existing service in Nix. See wg-easy-nix and openchamber-nix. Mostly you're wrapping binary options with a nix flake or on the harder end you're doing db injections (dangerous ofc). You can pretty easily get a declarative service like that.

Nix ticks that part of your brain that makes you wish it was all declarative, and that what you have defined is what exists.

You should at least give it a try.

• Try setting up your own config in Nix. (Yes you can have it install software from the Brew catalog).
• Then try setting up a server with it. You should try and touch the server as little as possible. I'd recommend remote builds and nix config applications.