Brandon Gottlob

Nix is a “purely functional” package manager aimed at creating reliable, reproducible build environments. It is an incredibly powerful tool, but it’s difficult to understand the benefits of its academically pure approach and the wide range of problems it can solve without having some experience using it. Its user manual is comprehensive and well-written, but very dense. I started using Nix a few months ago and only understand a small fraction of its functionality, but it turns out even that is enough to solve many common issues I face building development environments. [Read More]

Over the past two months, Exercism has proven to be a great tool for sharpening my Erlang skills. It provides an accessible, low-overhead way to learn the standard build tools and best practices of a language, which is lacking from other online programming practice platforms focused solely on interview preparation. Exercism has some limits, since the exercises are the same for every language, but feedback from mentors with deep knowledge of specific languages is invaluable. [Read More]