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Comment by firefoxd

5 days ago

Hey I wrote that :)

I still remember how I felt when I sent that first invoice. I was beating myself for not sending the invoice every week in the process, yet there I was with what I thought was a giant bill.

For context, the company that commissioned the work paid over $100k for that single page (I was in the email chain). It was part of a wider campaign that involved a whole lot of work, interviews, filming, celebrity appearances, etc. I just checked and the page is still up!

Ps: it involves that reliable car company, news paper, and mothers.

29 comments

firefoxd

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vessenes  3 days ago

That was my first reaction reading your story -- "outside partner probably paid 5 to 10x for it" -- if you'd gotten up to 50k, you would have had a problem. :)

bzmrgonz  5 days ago

Fyi: NixOS would shine everytime a client handed you a laptop for the gig. Your working environment reproducible and declarative. Setup in minutes, not hours.

  • AyyEye  3 days ago

    Having to figure out how to make whatever random god-awful corporate software they got sold work on nixos -- on a deadline -- sounds like seven circles of hell.

  • brainlessdev  3 days ago

    NixOS rocks, but if there is some software you need to install to comply with company policies (e.g. Vanta) then you may be in for some unexpected tinkering.

    I would suggest Home Manager though, which will let you set up your environment just as well and is very portable, while still affording you a mainstream host system of the company's choice.

    • rasmus-kirk  3 days ago

      +1 for Home Manager, as someone who uses Nix extensively (NixOS for server, Nix devshells, Home Manager on my dev machine) it's by far the most versatile tool the Nix ecosystem has to offer!

    • MarsIronPI  2 days ago

      What do you do if they hand you a Windows machine? Demand WSL? What if they don't give it to you?

  • Jean-Papoulos  3 days ago

    Absolutely not, the company laptop will be locked down and you won't be able to install your own OS.

    • chasd00  2 days ago

      yeah i was a little confused by the suggestion. If a client hands you a laptop to use for a project then there's corp. policy reasons why you have to use it as a contractor. (some companies have serious teeth in these policies)

      It would be interesting to be a fly on the wall and listen in when infosec calls you and asks why your laptop disappeared from their monitoring tools and you told them you installed nixos (assuming that would even be possible) because that's what you prefer.

    • drob518  2 days ago

      Exactly. They don’t want you to just use their hardware. They want you to use all of it.

  • TZubiri  3 days ago

    Knowing how to work with builtin tools would shine in that environment. I first learned this style in a Spolsky blogpost were they talked about Wasabi, a language that compiled to either PHP or Visual Basic I think it was, the idea being that those languages were preinstalled in most servers of the era.

    In a similar sense, knowing how to work with the builtin tools of major OS is a huge advantage. If you can write your code in vim or nano or notepad without breaking a sweat over your favourite hotkeys not working, that's a lot of hours saved.

  • SOLAR_FIELDS  5 days ago

    You don’t even need full on NixOS. I do the same with nix-Darwin and home manager. It’s not the perfect reproducible purists machine due to homebrew and Mac designs but it doesn’t really need to be, just mostly so

    • katdork  3 days ago

      Purity here is a difficult ask without the whole "erase your darlings" impermanence. In general, there is something regardless which handles stateful interactions.

      Often this is activation scripts, e.g. home-manager will complain at you if you are attempting to overwrite an existing file not managed with home-manager unless you tell it to forcibly overwrite the file.

      You can get yourself into situations where even in NixOS land, switch-to-configuration will refuse to switch due to some kind of violation, e.g. a systemd mount service wholly failing. I've had an experience like that recently.

      The Nix store is not a perfect get out of jail free card for this, everything impure must be wrangled by something eventually.

      What I'm really trying to say is, the world is messy and full of impurity, it's unavoidable. The thing that manages Brew, casks and app store applications for you within nix-darwin is no different than home-manager managing home.files or switch-to-configuration acting upon systemd.

  • firefoxd  3 days ago

    2015 me didn't know that. But chances are, I wouldn't have been able to install it with their company software policy tools.

brightbeige  3 days ago

I get this error, iOS safari

> Unable to load feed, Incorrect path or invalid feed

;)