Nix Your Bugs & Rust Your Engines #4

Nix Your Bugs & Rust Your Engines is a new meetup for people in the Rhein-Neckar region that are interested in Rust (the programming language), Nix (the package manager), or NixOS (the Linux distribution). The meetup begins with talks related to Rust and/or NixOS, and ends with casual networking and exchange between the meetup participants.

This time, it takes place at the Mafinex in Mannheim (3rd floor in unit C, 3. OG in Bauteil C), reachable by foot in ~15 minutes from the Mannheim main station. The nearest tram station is Lindenhof Windeckstraße with a distance of 500m.

The event is organized by Hackerstolz, a non-profit association from Mannheim with a focus on digital education. We are always looking for new active members, and for students, membership is free. If you are interested in organizing workshops, meetups or hackathons related to digital education and/or technology, get in touch with us at the meetup or send an email to [email protected]. We'd love to welcome you and support you in organizing new events.

If you have any questions, feel free to send us an email at [email protected] or contact us on Mastodon at @[email protected]. We also have a Matrix room: #nixrust-hd:matrix.org. All participants must adhere to our Code of Conduct.

Using NixOS for Pragmatical Self-hosting

by Andre Dossinger

Nix and NixOS enable new ways of managing systems. This talk is about using and abusing NixOS within a self-hosting setup. Do not expect best practices from this talk, but insights into how NixOS can be used in a problem oriented manner to preserve privacy and make complex setups manageable. Make sure to join an interactive discussion afterward: Feel free to pose uncomfortable questions and suggest improvements to the presenter!

Reading from Streams and Writing to Sinks

by Benjamin Sparks

Robust data streaming is a complex task, requiring low runtime overhead, safe buffer management, and robust error handling. To address these challenges, this talk showcases managing data streams in Rust, by using the well-known Tokio libraries to asynchronously read from and write to I/O streams and sinks. Specifically, an overview of the types and traits Tokio leverages to efficiently decode bytes and encode structured data in a type-safe manner is presented. The talk concludes with practical demonstrations of codecs for two different protocols.

Flake it until you make it: Nix Flakes in a Nutshell

by Stefan Machmeier

The flakes experimental feature is a major development for Nix, it introduces a policy for managing dependencies between Nix expressions, it improves reproducibility, composability and usability in the Nix ecosystem. Although it's still an experimental feature, flakes have been widely used by the Nix community. In this short talk, we want to deep dive into the advantages of Nix Flake and explore key components.