Exploring Nix, AWS re:Invent Highlights, and Fresh Dev Tools
Published: Dec 17, 2024
Last updated: Dec 17, 2024
Over the past few weeks there have been plenty of interesting releases on the radar. Personally, I've spent a lot of time following all the AWS re:Invent announcements while sprinkling in a few dives into Nix here and there. The Nix dive has been somewhat inspired by my wish to look into alternatives to Docker. There are a number of repos at work specifically not using Docker and I've had a mismatch of Node/npm versions between them and it's all a wee bit painful at the moment for consistent dev environments! Of course there are Node version managers, but it's specifically the tooling around it and required npm versions that are giving me the heeby jeebies.
I'm in the middle or revamping my website and shifting things around, so I'll include a short update this time but it will likely be the first newsletter that's also published on the updated website! Huge milestone. I will be migrating my newsletter emails away from Mailchimp and SendGrid over towards an AWS stack, so please bear with me while I reorganise my blog life outside of work hours. I'll write up a finalised blog post with all the changes and the newsletter migration once it's all done!
Content
- 🌐 Zero to Nix. I've been going down a bit of a Nix rabbithole recently, and while I won't say that it's the easiest to get started with, this reference is a great starting point.
- 📜 How I use Nix on macOS. Fatih has a nice walkthrough on how they got started with Nix which includes a lot of great references down the bottom. It was a what led me to the "Zero to Nix" website!
- 🌐 Flox. I saw this one from a Kelsey Hightower Bluesky post and it's an interesting abstraction that takes a lot of the difficulty out of getting started with Nix. Under the hood, I believe it uses Nix Flakes (don't quote me). I had a go setting it up for a local dev environment that used both Python and Node.js to great effect. Although I think there are different goals, it reminded me a little bit of DevEnv and DevBox, but I need to dig in a little deeper to understand more.
- 📦 tursodatabase/limbo. The team from Turso have a fascinating side-project going on that is different from libSQL. I'm keeping my eye on this one.
- 📦 ByteByteGoHq/system-design-101. Looks like an oldie, but a goodie. Stumbled upon this repo but it looks to be a nice set of "cheat sheet"-esque images to help ease the burden of preparing for system design questions.
- 📦 google-gemini/cookbook. As the name suggests, a repo that operates as a cook book for Google Gemini.
- 📦 0xPlaygrounds/rig). A Rust LLM library to help build LLM agents.
- 📦 aidenybai/react-scan. You may have already seen this one floating around the Internet where Aiden hassles big corps on their React re-renders.
- 🎥 openauthjs announcement. The team from SST (maybe only Dax idk) have a YouTube video giving the why behind their new JS authentication lib.
AWS
I'm setting out a section for the links I have for AWS this week thanks to re:Invent. A lot of goodies, but I'm only pulling out the ones I am interested in.
- Top announcements of AWS re:Invent. Be sure to check the top link for a round-up of everything if you are interested.
- A practical guide to getting started with policy as code. I've been interested in the PaC announcement which looks to follow a similar approach to existing IAM policies. I must admit, I haven't played around with it yet but have a look into it.
- Introducing AWS Aurora DSQL. This was a huge announcement. It's been in the works for a long time as a relational database that can scale. There are a number of gotchas and it's still in beta. I've already got a blog post walking through this one with Drizzle if you are interested in seeing it in action.
- Working with Amazon S3 Tables and table buckets. If you work in data, check out this new S3 feature. There is also deep dive into S3 video on YouTube that includes some interesting info on this and more.
Fun
Although it's been taking a side hit, I've also been reading/working through Elixir in Action and watching some of the phenomenal Crust of Rust series.
Both highly recommended, although the Crust of Rust series is a real brain melter if you're like me and are still working your way up the proverbial Rust hill.
See ya! 👋
Exploring Nix, AWS re:Invent Highlights, and Fresh Dev Tools
Introduction
