This week’s newsletter is delayed but extra long. That is because of NixCon 2026, which was just as excellent as last year. Regular links are in the bottom section.

I had lots of great conversations with participants of all levels and backgrounds, did some job searching, and, of course, watched lots of great talks. Some highlights:

• The opening ceremony showed that NixCon is still growing exponentially, with 555 participants this year.
• The state of the union showed more “line go up” news, including more contributors and contributions, industry funding, a grant program, sponsorships, and more.
• Alexander Foremny shared some lessons learned implementing the NixOS STIG.
• Nicolas Goudry shared some lessons learned introducing NixOS at “a large regulated operator in France”.
• Luc Perkins explained Determinate Systems offerings and contributions.
• Rok Garbas explained how Flox can help with a smoother beginner Nix user experience.
• Florian Pester explained what is needed for NixOS to comply with the EU Cyber Resilience Act.
• Eelco Dolstra showed several solutions for scaling Nix.
• Martin Messer quickly listed how Cyberus Linux is planning to support NixOS based products for the next five years.
• Akshay Oppiliappan introduced Tangled, a federated Git collaboration platform.
• Simon Hauser summarised the changes to Hydra in the last year.
• Valentin Gagarin explained why he changed his mind about flakes.
• Ivan Minčík explained how the Next Generation Internet program of the European Commission package and deploy the software they produce.
• Adam Höse explained how his DeltaNAR is used for space efficient Nix store updates (audio is missing at the start).
• Probably others; I still have to catch up on parallel talks I didn’t have time to watch.

Other highlights:

• Hacking at the venue on Friday (and Monday for those who stayed longer) - good Wi-Fi, plenty of power, and space for everyone.
• Free tickets for frequent contributors like yours truly.
• Sponsored participants.
• The documentation workshop.
• Excellent Polish food 😋, including lunch on the hack days.
• Lisanna Dettwyler gave out a lot of extremely swag shiny steel Nix logo necklaces she had commissioned from an actual jeweller.
• Lots of feedback on the Nixpkgs categorisation effort. The only objections were social, such as additional bikeshedding or discussion effort, and most of that should be handled by the categorisation team.

Fantastic conference all round, run by an organisation with a small budget and lots of amazing volunteers.

Now for our regularly scheduled program…

Packages:

• Farid Zakaria just made a flake which installs packages when you first run them in Every package is already installed 🤯.
• The Reproducible Builds project’s commandments are a handy reference.

LLMs:

• Iris Meredith argues that constraints, rather than the lack of them, are what we need to make LLMs useful in LLMs on the boundary.
• Nihar B. Shah tries Asking Authors About Their Own Papers, getting some pretty awful results. Please note that the papers in question were already borderline, so it would not be fair to generalise this to researchers in general.

UX:

• Scott Jenson argues that UX has stagnated in Are we really going to use the same Desktop UX forever?

Process:

• Mohamed Elashri argues that CERN Abandoning Scientific Linux Was a Mistake because of the stronger dependence on independent third parties.
• Sunil Pai explains the value of a steady pace (building momentum) rather than focusing on outcomes (huge efforts over short timescales) in the senior engineer death spiral.
• Boris Cherny shares his problem-solving process in I am often wrong.