add Anton's reference

content/log/2023/nixos-subjective.md

@@ -4,7 +4,8 @@ date: 2023-08-31T08:30:14+03:00
 ---
 
 Previously I [bloggged]({{< ref "log/2023/end-of-summer.md" >}}) about the cool
-things I did with NixOS. After publishing the post, my friend promptly asked:
+things I did with NixOS. After publishing the post, my friend [Anton][alavrik]
+promptly asked:
 
 > Wondering what's your professional take on NixOS. Would you give it a short
 > for a small-to-medium size server fleet provisioning? It felt rather involved
@@ -12,49 +13,50 @@ things I did with NixOS. After publishing the post, my friend promptly asked:
 
 Here is my response:
 
-> My journey to NixOS has been bumpy ride: it's been over a year since I looked
-> at first, and I still sometimes feel I did not escape the beginner level. The
-> learning curve is steep, and it is best to take it on gently or have a good
-> mentor nearby. I started by installing NixOS on my primary laptop, which was
-> a mistake. The annoyance of "I can do this in Debian in 5 seconds, and I am
-> an hour in without an end of sight in this thing" was very discouraging at
-> times.
->
-> I reinstalled my laptop back to Debian and took a few slow months to
-> provision 2 personal servers (the thing that's detailed in the blog). Taking
-> it slow has been fantastic experience. The folks in Matrix are very helpful
-> where documentation, especially high-level, is patchy. Now I feel comfortable
-> enough to retry NixOS on my laptop again.
->
-> Recently I realized that what I originally perceived as immaturity later
-> turned out lack of knowledge and/or lack of high-level documentation.
-> Technicals are good. Granted, I have found some bugs (though trivially
-> [fixed][nixos-prs]), but they mostly come from the power to configure it and
-> thus the huge surface area. Also, variety does not help: for example, there
-> are [10 deployment tools][deployment-tools] in the wiki ("nixops related"
-> counts too). It is hard to choose when I don't know what to expect, much less
-> know what's possible. It is also nontrivial to ask for a "high-level" advice:
-> a beginner will just tell their favorite system, not knowing the trade-offs
-> or alternatives. An expert will tell "depends on what you want to do". Moving
-> beyond such answer requires time and a beverage, which brings it's own
-> constraints. In this concrete case, I spent quite some time learning krops,
-> which later turned out to be a dead-end. Later moved to deploy-rs, which
-> turned out to be a good decision so far.
->
-> As far as recommendations go. For smaller companies, especially where
-> developers are also taking care of operations/deployments/infrastructure, I
-> can't recommend NixOS enough. For medium-large size companies it would
-> certainly bring a lot of value (I can already see how many things mine or my
-> sister-team at Uber had to re-implement which come out of the box in NixOS),
-> but, like with anything that has a different paradigm, requires a mentality
-> shift, which may be very hard organizationally.
->
-> There is at least one large-ish company I know that uses NixOS
-> ([proof][canva]). I did not look, I found it by accident. I also know a few
-> folks in Tweag; their primary consulting stream is helping companies onboard
-> to Bazel and/or Nix. They won't tell who they are, but there are "quite a
-> few, of different sizes, flying under the radar".
+My journey to NixOS has been bumpy ride: it's been over a year since I looked
+at first, and I still sometimes feel I did not escape the beginner level. The
+learning curve is steep, and it is best to take it on gently or have a good
+mentor nearby. I started by installing NixOS on my primary laptop, which was
+a mistake. The annoyance of "I can do this in Debian in 5 seconds, and I am
+an hour in without an end of sight in this thing" was very discouraging at
+times.
+
+I reinstalled my laptop back to Debian and took a few slow months to
+provision 2 personal servers (the thing that's detailed in the blog). Taking
+it slow has been fantastic experience. The folks in Matrix are very helpful
+where documentation, especially high-level, is patchy. Now I feel comfortable
+enough to retry NixOS on my laptop again.
+
+Recently I realized that what I originally perceived as immaturity later
+turned out lack of knowledge and/or lack of high-level documentation.
+Technicals are good. Granted, I have found some bugs (though trivially
+[fixed][nixos-prs]), but they mostly come from the power to configure it and
+thus the huge surface area. Also, variety does not help: for example, there
+are [10 deployment tools][deployment-tools] in the wiki ("nixops related"
+counts too). It is hard to choose when I don't know what to expect, much less
+know what's possible. It is also nontrivial to ask for a "high-level" advice:
+a beginner will just tell their favorite system, not knowing the trade-offs
+or alternatives. An expert will tell "depends on what you want to do". Moving
+beyond such answer requires time and a beverage, which brings it's own
+constraints. In this concrete case, I spent quite some time learning krops,
+which later turned out to be a dead-end. Later moved to deploy-rs, which
+turned out to be a good decision so far.
+
+As far as recommendations go. For smaller companies, especially where
+developers are also taking care of operations/deployments/infrastructure, I
+can't recommend NixOS enough. For medium-large size companies it would
+certainly bring a lot of value (I can already see how many things mine or my
+sister-team at Uber had to re-implement which come out of the box in NixOS),
+but, like with anything that has a different paradigm, requires a mentality
+shift, which may be very hard organizationally.
+
+There is at least one large-ish company I know that uses NixOS
+([proof][canva]). I did not look, I found it by accident. I also know a few
+folks in Tweag; their primary consulting stream is helping companies onboard
+to Bazel and/or Nix. They won't tell who they are, but there are "quite a
+few, of different sizes, flying under the radar".
 
 [nixos-prs]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3Amotiejus+is%3Aclosed
 [deployment-tools]: https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Applications#Deployment
 [canva]: https://opencollective.com/canvaofficial/expenses/115338
+[alavrik]: https://github.com/alavrik