I recently got a new Macbook, and began setting up the Nix package manager to install my developer toolset. I mainly did this to try and have a working setup without installing Homebrew. Since I ran into a few issues, I wanted to briefly document what I did and why in case others wanted to try the same. Why Nix? (and why not Homebrew or MacPorts?) The short answer: hype.

After 2 years of learning German I’ve noticed that, for the most part, you can go a long way by mapping foreign concepts to ones that you already know. In particular, I’ve had success mapping aspects of German grammar to programming concepts I use every day. After all, programmers deal with weird grammars all the time, why not take advantage of that skill? Gendered nouns: forward error correction Probably the first difficulty people run into when leaning German is memorizing the gender of each noun and properly declining that noun’s articles when used in a sentence.