Matthew Croughan - Use flake.nix, not Dockerfile - MCH2022

A lightning talk I gave at May Contain Hackers 2022, prepared overnight after a beer.

[ChrisMcDonough]

Love the distinction between repeatable and reproducible :)

[FreeSpeechWarrior]

You're a great speaker and you have an extreme passion for all things nix. Your breadth of knowledge and technical proficiency is amazing. I love the way you don't waste any time giving the audience useless fluff, you're all business. I have shared your videos with all my colleagues and friends.

[Becoming-Human]

Thank you, Matthew, for presenting this presentation! It was awesome! Please do more! :-)

[itme_brain]

Love the nixOS shill at the end. Great presentation.

[wojtekkrupski]

Goddam! The best high-level explanation in the whole internet! Now, I comprehend what Nix is!

[fabiandrinksmilk]

I really liked this talk. I also like how you can make really minimal images with Nix. Normally the minimal way was to just use the Alpine image, but with Nix you essentially build from scratch pretty easily.

[vitriowibisono]

Great! Finally something new. I just what i needed

[DalePatch]

I did not know about AArch64 emulation this way. That could definitely make creating software stacks for my Pine64 devices easier. Reproducibility across AArch64 and x86-64 is what attracted me to NixOS initially.

[soupglasses]

Definitely a bumpy presentation to watch, lots of thoughts and not enough time for them all. Cool idea to use nix for container creation. Next time i would love to see bigger fonts on a light background to help with contrast. As nice as dark mode is for work, projectors do not do it justice.

Love to see what you do in the future! :D

[biigsmokee]

fantastic presentation, was about to ask for a longer one but just seen there is one.

[anthonyoleinik]

Great talk, thanks for doing it! Format is a little too speedy but that's not your problem :). 

A good area for future public education here would be deployment. I'm evaluating this for work / life - one benefit of docker is that it plugs in quite easy to GCP Cloud Run. Going to have to research if flakes allow a similar easy integration.

[johanyngman]

Awesome, I love it, great presentation. I'm going to start learning this right away!

[DreamsAPI]

Awesome talk, need more content, and thank you!!!

[RedneckPythagorean-msox]

Impressive, self-apparent competence. Fuck ya man, much respect.

[AungusMacgyver]

All of this sounds more like a problem with common Docker practices than the actual functionality of Docker.

3:08 You can specify a specific base image using an SHA instead ubuntu:latest if you need/want that level of specificity. Or use a specific Ubuntu release tag as a middle way.

3:53 You can create a base image with all your apt installation already done. You can specify specific versions for apt packages if you need/want package installation to be part of the dockerfile.

Nix also relies on the Internet to download stuff so I don't see how that is different. Ex., pulling the hello-world tar from GNU servers.

8:13 "Nix guarantees that we're going to get the input from the Internet every time".... How on earth can you do that? You might be able to check if you got a different input if a hash has changed but that's not the same thing as getting the sams input every time.

Docker builds in a sandbox too. That's the entire idea behind a container.

[eatthemalive]

you can pin a container in docker via sha ... admittedly this isn't very common
I'd be surprised if we couldn't do the same using something like apt I'd also be pretty stoked to get the C build process down. I don't like muddying my path for headers

3/3 talk

[gasdia]

the Paddy the Baddy of software development :)

[maodo-diop]

Great video. Have you a blog you are a teacher.

[washed_dev]

i need to up my game. this guy is a f*ing chad

[trejohnson]

no crows in your cornfield, thats for sure!