Notes from the intersection of Gradle, NixOS, and developer productivity — build systems, reproducible environments, and a decade of building software that actually works.
A set of best practices for setting up and maintaining Gradle dependency verification, distilled from real-world experience at GradleX and a few additional lessons learned along the way.
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Developer productivity consultant specializing in Gradle and NixOS. Apache Software Foundation member, GradleX founder, and co-founder of TestLens.
A walk through the two upstream design choices that combine to silently disable Gradle's rich console auto-detection on Nix: a native-platform cache that doesn't notice patched libraries, and a JDK that can't see /lib64. With the upstream fixes that would address both.
Read full post →Planning a migration of my NixOS flake configuration to the dendritic pattern: what it is, why I want it, and the pitfalls I found before writing a single line of code.
Read full post →I prefix every code review comment with one of five emojis to signal what response I expect from the author. Here is the convention.
Read full post →Packaging the jfmt Java formatter as a native binary for NeoVim: from a JVM wrapper through weeks of reproducibility debugging to a statically-linked GraalVM binary.
Read full post →gh-get now sets up upstream and origin remotes correctly when forking, hides noisy git progress by default, always prints the destination path, and adds a --verbose flag.
Read full post →How I migrated from a custom rsync-based sync to a proper restic backup setup that follows the 3-2-1 rule - and the NixOS module I had to write myself.
Read full post →gh-get v2.2.0 adds real-time clone progress, accepts any GitHub URL, and introduces a --fork flag.
Read full post →How to build and use a fork of an OpenTofu provider in a Nix devShell using mkProvider and withPlugins, scoped to a project, reproducible, and easy to throw away.
Read full post →How I went from a generic Astro community template to a custom design system - with a detour through Google Stitch and two days of iterating with Claude.
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