Join us on May 25, 2020 at 1:00 pm EST for ShipIt! presents How Shopify Uses Nix, a discussion about how Shopify is using Nix to rebuild our developer tooling with Burke Libbey. Please register.
Over the past year and a bit, Shopify has been progressively rebuilding parts of our developer tooling with Nix. I initially planned to write about how we're using Nix now, and what we're going to do with it in the future (spoiler: everything?). However, I realize that most of you won't have a really clear handle on what Nix is, and I haven't found a lot of the introductory material to convey a clear impression very quickly, so this article is going to be a crash course in what Nix is, how to think about it, and why it's such a valuable and paradigm-shifting piece of technology.
There are a few places in this post where I will lie to you in subtle ways to gloss over all of the small nuances and exceptions to rules. I'm not going to call these out. I'm just trying to build a general understanding. At the end of this post…