A recent release of Nickel added algebraic data types and pattern matching. This blog post explains the motivation behind this addition, the design choices made, the considerations around backward compatibility and how ADTs can be useful for a configuration language.

No packet should pass unencrypted or unauthenticated.

We just came out of Kubecon 2024. Here are our impressions of the trends and evolutions in infrastructure, configuration management and cloud native computing

With Nickel releasing 1.0 I'm excited to announce the 0.1 release of Tf-Ncl, a tool for writing Terraform deployments with Nickel instead of HCL.

We went to FOSDEM23 and CfgMgmtCamp23. Here are my impressions of the trends and evolutions in infrastructure and configuration management

Comparing Nix input hashes can guarantee that some refactors are bug-free.

A collection of helpful tips for Bazel users.

How and when to use NixOS specialisations to manage different boot environments

How to manage NixOS systems using Nix flakes.

How to setup a Buildkite-based CI for Nix projects with workers running on GCP.

How to set up a remote Bazel cache, and why it is a good idea.

Learn how Nix's new post-build hooks feature can automatically sign and upload artifacts to a binary cache in a trusted way.

I want to present you a Terraform plugin for securely managing secrets that was written for Digital Asset, who kindly allowed me to open source it. The general idea of this plugin is to protect secrets by making use of Terraform’s state. Terraform maintains the state of the world…

Today we’re excited to announce lorri, a new tool for NixOS, Linux, and macOS that makes developing with Nix even nicer: When people try lorri, we often hear that it is more magical than they expected. What is lorri? lorri is a nix-shell replacement for project development…

In a recent project I was tasked with creating a local testing environment for a Kubernetes cluster the client was actively working on. The main requirements were: Cross platform: It should work on Linux and macOS. Ease of use: The setup should be easy to use. Suitable for CI…

Have you ever needed to execute in another computer a binary that you have built, only to find that it doesn’t work because it depends on shared libraries that aren’t installed? Or even worse, you don’t have admin rights on the machine, so you cannot install the correct…

If you’re a conscientious developer like I am my boss is, you probably have a benchmark suite for the programs and libraries you develop. This allows you to see the impact of your changes on the performance of your applications. However, the temporal aspect of these benchmark…

As Haskell is increasingly used in production environments, the Haskell toolchain is of critical importance to a growing number of people and organisations. At the heart of this toolchain is GHC (The Glasgow Haskell Compiler). Conceived nearly thirty years ago as a research…

In this post I’ll show you how to see the performance of your software project improve over the entire lifetime of the project. That is, how to get something like the below picture. For that, you’ll need to systematically track and store benchmark results over time. We’ll use…