Embark in an unconventional open source journey with Pol Dellaiera in episode 5 of the chmodcast. It all starts with saving every euro to buy his first computer as a kid… Then it goes to Drupal, Symfony, and now Nix, where Pol’s contributions as a maintainer with commits rights make the lives of PHP developers easier than ever. Package manager, operating system and even functional language: Nix does it all. Let’s dive in!

• 00:20 — Episode introduction
• 01:45 — SymfonyCon Brussels
• 03:00 — Introducing Pol Dellaiera
• 05:03 — A love for computers that leads to a career in IT
• 08:31 — Open source journey, from Drupal 5 to Symfony to Nix
• 18:31 — Installing NixOS and saving configuration files
• 21:45 — Maintaining and adding packages to Nix
• 24:20 — Nix language
• 26:36 — Example of a contribution to Nix
• 30:33 — How many people work on Nix?
• 32:43 — How to use and contribute to Nix?
• 34:40 — What’s in the future for Nix? (Flakes!)
• 37:33 — Silly questions time!
• 41:10 — Next episode teaser

Thank you to Pol for taking us on his journey, but it doesn’t end there! He just published his master’s thesis about “Reproducibility in Software Engineering”, 20+ years after completing his bachelor’s degree! Check out the links below to learn more about Pol’s ongoing projects and stay in the loop with his work.

• Mastodon
• GitHub
• Blog
• Master’s thesis “Reproducibility in Software Engineering”
• Nix & NixOS

Do you have an open-source story of your own that you want to share? Join us for an episode of Change Mode, apply now to be a guest.

Shoutout to our incredible podcast host, Marine Gandy, our resident Drupal expert and DevRel Engineer at Platform.sh. There’ll be plenty more from Marine coming soon, stay tuned!

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