Nix at SCALE
The first-ever NixCon in North America was co-located with SCALE this year. The event drew a mix of experienced Nix users and people new to the project. I attended talks that covered using Nix to build Docker images, upcoming changes to how NixOS performs early booting, and ideas for making the set of services provided in nixpkgs more useful for self hosting. (LWN covered the relationship between Nix, NixOS, and nixpkgs in a recent article.) Near the end of the conference, a collection of Nix contributors gave a "State of the Union" about the growth of the project and highlighting areas of concern.
Docker
Xe Iaso, a "Senior Technophilosopher" at Fly.io gave a talk called "Nix is a better Docker image builder than Docker's image builder". Iaso opened the talk by explaining that "Nix is different from what many developers expect", and requires "a lot of work upfront". Because of that, xe (Iaso uses xe/xer pronouns) is worried that "Nix will wither and die in the industry". Xe said that Docker, on the other hand, has had unparalleled success. It has become the "de-facto package format for the internet", with many large hosting providers (such as Iaso's own employer) offering the ability to run Docker containers as a service. Xe proposed that showing how Nix could fit into existing workflows that use Docker — while delivering better reproducibility and performance — could help drive Nix adoption.