Jacek's Blog
Software Engineering Consultant
When you spin up a new VM or bare metal server at some cloud provider, what is
the fastest and easiest way to get the server to run a certain configuration?
In this article, I show how to do the partitioning, formatting, and installing a
fully configured NixOS, starting from a random rescue
system, in 5 minutes and with literally a single command:
nixos-anywhere.
Very often during development, it is useful to run your code in a scenario that is as near to a final deployment as possible, but not in some cloud environment where it’s hard to change specific parts without going through the full CI/CD chain. I find it very useful to quickly build, run, iterate, rebuild, and rerun VMs with NixOS Linux on my development machines. This week I demonstrate this aspect of my workflow with NixOS.
Technical documentation is tedious but important for every project. Hence, it should be easy to create, extend, and keep up to date. I tend to use the open-source tool MkDocs for projects. In this blog article, I share how to extend and package this tool with nice plugins that make documentation easier.
This week I was dealing with image processing and linear algebra, and I needed a quick derivation of a specific kind of matrix. With GNU Octave to the rescue, this cost me only a few minutes! This article represents my notes from this little journey from the mathematical derivation of the matrix and the symbolic solution that I then ported to C++.
Most big C++ projects lack a clear structure: They consist of multiple modules, but it is not as easy to create individually buildable, portable, testable, and reusable libraries from them, as it is with projects written in Rust, Go, Haskell, etc. In this article, I propose a C++ project structure using CMake that makes it easy to have incremental monorepo builds and a nice modular structure at the same time.
I never install toolchains globally on my systems. Instead, every project comes with its own nix file that describes the complete development toolchain versions and dependencies. This way, fresh checkouts always build the same way on every machine. This week I would like to show you how I set up a C++ project with the Qt Quick framework, and how to package the app and make it runnable for other nix users.
This week, I like to share a project with you that started as a very interesting challenge and developed into an interdisciplinary, productive, and fun experience: A fully automatic multi-display end-to-end customer test prototype. In the end, it was surprising to see what parts of the code the most effort went into.
This is my trip report from the late 2022 Oceansprint hackathon on Lanzarote. For more information please also have a look on the website: https://oceansprint.org
This is my trip report from the awesome NixOS community hackathon on Lanzarote. For more information please also have a look on the website: https://oceansprint.org
This article explains how to quickly set up a C++ project environment with
complete toolchain- and dependency management with nix.
nix is a powerful package manager for Linux and
other Unix systems (It is indeed a more powerful alternative to conan and docker) that makes package
management reliable and reproducible.
After setting up the project and playing around with it, we will parametrize
the project description in order to automatically build it with different
compilers and dependency library versions (GCC 7 & 8, Clang 7 & 8, lib boost
1.6.6 - 1.6.9, lib poco 1.9.0 & 1.9.1).
While learning Haskell and using its really smart library dependency management tools (cabal and stack), i realized that the C++ eco system has a problem:
There are no handy established tools that let the developer declare which libraries (and versions) are required for a project which can then be automatically installed in a portable way.
Nix however convinced me to be more versatile and powerful than Conan and handier than Docker, Vagrant, etc. (although it’s fair to say that i am mixing use cases here a little bit!)
In this article, i am going to showcase this great tool a little bit.