After almost two years of being cooped up at home, the main thing I ended up doing was talking to people. It was nice to catch up and exchange ideas without the friction of computers in between. I didn’t get a lot done this week but I think that syncing up brains will be useful down the line.
With Bernardo, we spent a bit of time looking at voting systems. We were talking about how to improve governance and leadership, and ended up looking at other communities like Debian, Python, Kubernetes, ... In particular, we were interested in their voting systems as a way to make the system more democratic. If the RFCs could be voted on when they are “ready”, it would change the nature of the shepherds to be mostly helping build the best possible RFC.
The rest of my time was spent benchmarking nix and nixpkgs. I think that our community is relying on nixpkgs overlays too much, and I needed those benchmarks to make one of my points. It resulted in a series of articles that I have started writing and will be publishing soon on https://zimbatm.com/. Of course, as with each new article, I will first have to re-do the website entirely with a new static site generator 😊
WIP blog post: https://numtide.notion.site/nixpkgs-instances-are-expensive-b65f68c4a31145aa986fb99496a21e44