I've been a NixOS devotee since mid early 2016 when I first installed it on my laptop. Immutable infrastructure has been my love for years, and NixOS was the first tool which made it easy. I remember the first time I deployed NixOS at work: replacing a complicated Packer and chef-solo AMI build process with a trivial NixOS module and about 300 lines of Nix. What a watershed moment for me.

Since then, I've become radicalized against faux-declarative tooling. Truly declarative tooling or bust. Truly declarative tooling or it is busted.

I work to keep hydra.nixos.org running smoothly. I like to get people in to a video call and talk about the work they're doing. I like to hear from users and the interesting and unique places they've run nixops deploy, and the weirdly embedded places they're deploying to. I like to hear the transition stories of "we used to do ... but now we use Nix and everything is much more predictable."

Let's sand down the sharp corners. Let's minimize state, and push it to the edges. The rest can be truly declarative and reproducible.