Call for Participants Summer of Nix 2024

Apply for the Summer of Nix 2024 to join one of four teams in making selected free and open source software (FOSS) projects work reliably on a whim using Nix and NixOS. The deadline for applicants is May 10, 2024.

Summer of Nix is a coordinated effort to support selected free and open source software (FOSS) projects, by making them available as Nix packages or NixOS service modules. It is part of the NGI Zero programmes which offer not only grants but also support services. One of them is reproducable packaging with Nix offered by the NixOS Foundation.

Summer of Nix 2024

The Summer of Nix is a rare opportunity for students or early-career professionals with diverse technical skills and interests to practice disciplined software development with Nix while contributing to the public good and receiving some payment for it in the form of a stipend. Participation in Summer of Nix has been – for some – a pathway to attractive jobs in software development.

How to apply

For more information on how to apply, timelines and eligibility criteria go to Github.com/ngi-nix/summer-of-nix or Discourse.nixos.org

Why package with Nix?

It is important for a project that is meant to scale to gather traction as early as possible. There should be a convenient and easy to obtain development and testing environment, to ensure people that are interested have a low barrier of entry. Nix is a powerful vendor-agnostic package solution for Linux, Mac OS X and other Unix systems that makes package management reliable and reproducible. It provides atomic upgrades and rollbacks, side-by-side installation of multiple versions of a package, multi-user package management and easy setup of build environments. By using the unique capabilities of Nix, and associated projects like NixOps and NixOS, complex dependencies (such as services) can be managed. This way the project is able to have a cross-distro development and delivery system that is easy to integrate with continuous integration, and allows anyone to easily check in to the development process of the projects. It also creates full transparency: the entire setup is declarative and allows for reproducible builds, so every source origin and every patch is completely verifiable.

Acknowledgements

NGI Zero is made possible with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet programme, under the aegis of DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology. NGI Zero receives funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe research and innovation programme.