Nix Taco Sprint 2026

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y’all<br>I’ve been to a few different styles of conferences, meetups, hackerspaces, hackathons, etc. over the years. Taco Sprint was entirely different.<br>10~ people who use Nix and NixOS in different ways with very different professional, cultural, and technical backgrounds. English was the primary language, Spanish was secondary.<br>We were hosted in La Saladita, in Zihuatanejo and shared two large villas that were beachfront… but like the nerds we are, we mostly enjoyed the beach from the view indoors while looking over our laptop monitors.<br>Traveling in from the airport was easy, I grabbed the rental and popped into the address into Google Maps. The last leg of the instructions were funky because of how off the beaten path the houses seemed to be.<br>I walked into the villa on the first day to a group of people sitting around eating dinner poolside, deep in Nix discussion. It was a strange sensation meeting people for the first time while having Nix as the common thread among us. Felt good to nerd out. But the nerding out didn’t stop until my departing flight took off.<br>The days went something like this: We did breakfast together at 9 a.m., hacked together or solo until 3, and then we had lunch. Hacked more until 8, then we had dinner. Hacked from then until people peeled off for rest. Rinse and repeat for the next day.<br>If you didnt know it was nix focused, you couldve thought it was an AI sprint. Everyone had wildly different experiences with AI and the topic was present in almost every conversation. One of the themes of AI is what will this mean long term and the other was "think bigger" about how to use AI.<br>I got some documents from Geoff that were related to creating/tuning SLO alerts around error budgets. These pdfs become the foundation for a claude skill set I built to help begin to reign in a noisy alerting system. The skills help you determine what kind of SLO you should set for a particular service, hardware uptime, etc.

I also spent a great deal of time working on an internal tool I’m calling gregg. It’s a binary (and claude skill set, lots of options to run) that builds in a massive list of troubleshooting skills based off Brendan Gregg’s blog posts and published books. I bop around servers all day, and getting a grounded set of portable tests/checks to run on any host seemed like an easy win. I like troubleshooting alot, it’s how I’ve gotten the majority of my skills. For work however, I prefer triage to be quick, accurate, concise and repeatable. I think this is a good step towards that. I’m packaging it for Ubuntu via a .deb make pipeline and also as a nix flake. The nix flake is more useful in my opinion…. you can just nix run the url with the flake and you’re troubleshooting, no additional installation steps. gregg is not battle tested yet. I did create a suite of synthetic tests that replicated common problems that can present as one way but are really being caused by something else. I’m not sure I’ll release this, it’s very experimental right now. It was (is still?) fun to build. I do have high hopes for it though.<br>so like what does this even like mean bro or is there a tl;dr?<br>The group was small enough that it felt like we were a small startup, laptops crowded together on a single table, working on Nix projects. It was a great time and reminded me of friends who weren't there but who I wished were because they would jump right in and start hacking. It's difficult to create that environment I think. The sprint format was the best learning experience I’ve had in a long time.

How to configure the built in brew mcp-server with claude-code

You'll need to have brew and claude-code installed. Then…

01 Oct 2025