Simon Shine

I don’t do much front-end web development these days, but I enable people who do.

GitHub Actions workflows usually start like this: - uses: actions/checkout@v6 v6 is a git tag that points to some commit for the release of this version of an action.

hk is a fast, modern git hook manager and project linter configured in Pkl. hk-nix is to hk what lefthook-nix is to lefthook: you install hk with Nixpkgs, declare your hooks in Nix, pin every tool with Nix, and the hooks install themselves whenever you en…

Note: This article builds on my dendritic sops-nix flake template.

For the past three years I’ve connected my Nix machines using Tailscale by running sudo tailscale login once per machine.

This tutorial sets up a flake using flake-parts, import-tree, devshell and sops-nix.

tl;dr ¶ Some of my sandboxed CLI agents aren’t in nixpkgs, so they ride along as flake inputs.

tl;dr ¶ I want to commit my secrets encrypted to git with sops-nix I want to publish my infra-as-code, but don’t want to publish my git secrets So I put my secrets in a private git+file flake input Motivation ¶ I run Kubernetes clusters managed declarativ…

Michael Snoyman wrote a thinkpiece called The Boring Haskell Manifesto (2019) about how to adopt Haskell into your organization, and how to make your organization productive with Haskell for non-wizards.

Note: You can see the project in action here: https://git.shine.town/infra/runners I decided to bootstrap a Kubernetes cluster with Talos and kubenix during my vacation.

When using Nix to orchestrate a new project, I find myself choosing between these three levels: 1.

It’s exactly one month since I wrote: Vendoring Hugo themes with Nix and Git calendar Feb 7, 2026 I read an interesting article, The Rust Calling Convention We Deserve by Miguel Young de la Sota, and I couldn’t help but think that the website was really n…

In my recent attempts to modernize my CI pipelines, I’ve experimented with and subsequently let go of pre-commit.

tl;dr ¶ I’m refactoring my system flake using The Dendritic Pattern I’m testing the system flake using nixos-shell I’ll completely wipe my laptop’s NixOS installation when ready Table of contents ¶ Motivation (some ranting) What is a dendritic flake?

tl;dr ¶ I’m extending AutoAgents so that it supports Z.ai, a frontier AI company Z.ai’s GLM-5 model might or might not compete with Claude Opus 4.5 at a very competitive price.

tl;dr: ¶ I installed NixOS using nixos-anywhere for the first time.

This post is about self-hosting Vaultwarden, an unofficial Bitwarden server, so that you can have self-hosted password management.

You become a git expert when you learn about git reflog.

tl;dr: ¶ I forked the git repo for my Hugo theme and pushed my feature to a branch I refactored the blog repo’s Nix code to be multi-file and flake-based I switched my Nix-vendored theme to use this git repo/branch I made it possible to use the git repo c…

Recently I wrote Speeding up CI with Nix.

In the article Maintaining libraries with Claude I update the CI pipeline to release the package automatically on Hackage and GitHub when pushing a version tag.

tl;dr: ¶ I’m taking Nix more seriously on my MacBook I want to share my zsh config across all systems Because my zsh config was NixOS-only, I’ve had to refactor it Why ¶ I’ve been running NixOS for 3 years now.

tl;dr ¶ Claude bumps the versions.

I used NixOS to define two exam computers for a programming exam.

Planen var at stoppe som underviser på fuldtid og have et enkelt valgfag som timelærer.

I quit my teacher job.

I Om at blive rekursivt beruset med monoider modellerer jeg superdrinks som en monoid og viser hvordan man kan programmere med dem ved hjælp af simple algebraiske datatyper.

I really like NixOS.

Jeg har, som mange andre, været grebet af sangen PPAP: Jeg har ikke kunnet lade sangen slippe, fordi PIKOTARO tydeligvis formidler abstrakt algebra: Studiet af algebraiske strukturer, hvor man betragter sammensætningen af matematiske objekter, der ikke nø…

In April 2022 I made a review of Haskell libraries for JSON Schema.

Har du nogensinde arbejdet på et softwareprojekt og set en fil kaldet Makefile?

Jeg prøvede for nyligt at kombinere Claude Code med issue tracking.

tl;dr (den ultra korte version): ¶ I de tekniske fag på Erhvervsakademi København kunne man… afskaffe brugen af Azure Web Apps, Azure Managed MySQL på 2. semester introducere Docker Compose og Linux på 2. semester i stedet driftssætte via Docker Compose på

Artiklen her er introen til min daværende blog, datamatik.blog, som jeg drev i 2025 mens jeg var datamatiker-lærer på KEA, Københavns Erhvervsakademi.

Disclaimer: Jeg er ikke mixolog.

I have a small Rust web service that serves HTTP on a port.

I min barsel har jeg leget med et Corne v3 split keyboard, som jeg har købt på Taobao.

Introduction ¶ Problem: You run NixOS and want to download, compile and run some project on GitHub.

datamatik, sb.

tl;dr ¶ See the tutorial code at https://github.com/nix-tools/nix-hugo This tutorial… Provides a development environment for running interactively Provides a derivation for deployment on NixOS Deploys to a webserver using just, ssh and scp Step 0: Prerequ…

This is a programming interview question I got some years ago.

You heard it.

Update 2025-07-26: This review is obsolete.

I recently experimented with Rust trait instances on bounded generic types.

Did you ever see pseudo-code in job ads that looked like if ($you.like_to_work($here) === True) { $job.apply(); } and thought to yourself a bunch of things about variables not being in scope, and whether their actual code has utterly specific library fu…

tl;dr: I stuck the IPv4 and IPv6 address of my VPS into an SPF record field text.

When we discuss the potential future usefulness of cryptocurrency, we compare against existing use-cases of fiat currency.

Something I see quite often is a combination of grep and cut to extract URLs from JSON objects, for example: $ curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/go-gitea/gitea/releases/latest \ | grep browser_download_url \ | cut -d '"' -f 4 \ | grep '\linux-amd64$'

Life is understood backwards, but must be lived forwards. — Søren Kierkegaard A summary on good commit messages ¶ Because version control systems, like git and GitHub, are at the heart of modern software development workflows, most workflows are heavily i…

I want share two open-source contributions that were lost on their original audience, yet has taught me something about testing functions that use randomness.