Field notes on systems, judgment, and the infrastructure behind hands-on learning. Long-form, occasionally opinionated, and — like everything we ship — tested against real environments.
shell.nix?Expressions, the sixth free Part of LabCraft's Nix course, is now available. It opens right after First Contact and takes you from single values to reading a real shell.nix the way the evaluator does.
GC Roots, the fifth free Part of LabCraft's Nix course, is now available. On a real NixOS machine, it asks you to predict what garbage collection will remove before Nix shows you what it kept.
Profiles and Generations, the fourth free Part of LabCraft's Nix course, is now available. Remove a tool, restore it by switching generations, and prove why wiping history still leaves its store path on disk.
Closures, the third Part of LabCraft's Nix course, is now available. On a real NixOS machine, it asks you to predict what an upgrade will actually move before Nix shows you the answer.
On the open internet, terminating someone's TLS in the middle is an attack. Inside a trust domain we own end to end, it is what keeps a real Nix install command from failing because an upstream had a bad day.
Store Paths, the second Part of LabCraft's Nix course, is now available. It uses a real NixOS machine to answer what names a path and why that name moves.
nix Didn't Hang. It Was Evaluating the World!A beginner's first nix search looked like a tiny lookup and behaved like a memory benchmark. We pinned the installer, pinned nixpkgs, and baked the eval cache so the lesson could start with Nix, not the OOM killer.
LabCraft is free during the public beta. Start the Nix course in your browser, work on a real machine, and learn by fixing the failures Nix beginners commonly hit.
Learn Nix on a real VM that's yours to break, with chapters built around the failures everyone hits and checks that inspect what actually ran on the box.
New posts land here first, then go out across the channels we actually read. Pick your poison — or grab the feed.