Nixverse
Setting up development environments—both globally for a system and locally for individual projects—is a common challenge in software engineering. In my view, Nix comes closest to an ideal solution, despite having its own quirks like any piece of software.
However, Nix’s out-of-the-box user experience isn’t great. It tends to involve a lot of boilerplate. While its lazy evaluation model is theoretically well-suited for sharing configurations across multiple machines, in practice this is often difficult due to the way machine-specific configurations are structured.
To address these issues, I designed an architecture where configurations are filesystem-based and machines can be managed collectively as groups. Thanks to this design, tasks like managing secrets and deploying machines in parallel become much simpler.
All of my Nix configurations live in a single codebase, built on top of this framework.