# ~~Good hard work~~ Useless side projects

Roughly a week ago I stumbled onto the [website](https://nixos.org) for the NixOS project. I was lured in by their fancy talk about *reproducible, declarative, and reliable systems*. I`ve been looking for tools to make repeatable setups for user space tools. I would love it if I could go from bare metal to working, configured setup in a single command. Ansible is a great tool, but still requires two steps at a minimum: configure the base os with at least one user, then run the ansible script. Nix promises something better.

So, for the last week I've been buying my head into the Nix programming language. I've been learning the conventions, the Nix way of doing things. I've gone from editing my configuration.nix file to attempting to write flakes. I have spent every free minute trying to learn and write code and troubleshoot and understand what the hell it's all doing. I ~~hate it~~ don't understand any of it. I love the concept of declarative systems. I just don't get the Nix language yet.