In 2005, Joel Spolsky’s software company, Fog Creek, filmed a documentary about their summer internship program. The film is called Aardvark’d: 12 Weeks with Geeks, and it follows four college interns as they design, implement, and launch a completely new software product.

That’s not the interesting part.

Looking back on this documentary 18 years later, it’s striking how many interviews it captured with people who would go on to greater fame and success:

Highlights

• I think through what it would take to add recurring subscriptions for TinyPilot Pro.
• I’ve done some more exploration into Nix for managing development environments.

Goal grades

At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals:

Nix is a tool that allows you to define your software environment from code. Nix has several components to it, and one of the most interesting to me is NixOS, which lets you use Nix tooling to define your entire OS configuration using plaintext files.

I only recently started experimenting with Nix, and there’s a huge amount to learn. One of the first things I tried to do was install NixOS on my Raspberry Pi, but my first several attempts failed. Every NixOS Pi tutorial I could find was either incomplete or out of date.

In creating the tutorial, “Installing NixOS on Raspberry Pi 4,” I ran into a ton of paths that didn’t work.

I’ve collected them here for the sake of saving others time retrying the same steps.

The standard NixOS aarch64 image doesn’t work

When I checked the NixOS download page, I saw that they offered 64-bit ARM images.

Highlights

• I’m trying to figure out where I’m spending unnecessary time on TinyPilot.
• I realized I’ve once again become addicted to email.
• I built my first server rack.

Goal grades

At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals: