Today marks my one-year anniversary on the Fediverse, or to be more specific, on chaos.social, my Mastodon server of choice. Over the last year, I have used the social network almost daily. And, to spoil my conclusion right at the start: I am going to stay.

NixOS has been on my radar for a while. I think I first heard of it around 4 years ago as this really unconventional and unorthodox Linux distribution. I was familiar with the general idea of having an immutable system, pinning versions and all that but didn't pay it much further attention. At that time, I was still very inexperienced with Linux (I still kind of am). Somewhat recently, a lot of people in my online social circles have started using and/or promoting NixOS (or Nix in general), so I started learning more about it and getting an idea of how you actually work with it. I was surprised to see how you could model pretty much any setup in Nix and how people were using it for literally anything.

Last year, I wrote a library for WebAuthn authenticator emulation in Java. I did my usual Gradle setup for Java libraries: adding the java-library plugin and explicitly setting sourceCompatibility and targetCompatibility to make sure that I don't accidentally make my releases incompatible with the version that I want to target. In this case, Java 8 (Java enthusiasts, I'll give you a second to let out the sigh). Easy, right?

I am not a web designer. In fact, I'm usually pretty bad at creating any sort of visual design. And that's fine, I think. There's always something that you're not good at or that you don't enjoy, and it's not a big deal because there are plenty of other people who are good at it. Still, something about the fact that I never really made a decent-looking website myself didn't sit right with me. So I figured I'd take it upon myself to redesign this blog and try to get out of my comfort zone.

A while back (my god, has it really been two and a half years? 😟), I wrote an article about writing Spigot plugins in Clojure. In that post, I presented what could be considered a proof of concept for how you can approach this unusual combination.