Fission Fragments is our weekly links roundup. You can also subscribe by email.
Weekly Links
We’ve been looking at Nix for a couple of different use cases. Now that Nix works again on the newest version of MacOS, 10.15 Catalina, we thought the timing was good to share a couple of different Nix resources. We also have a new #nix-school channel in our Discord chat where you can follow new links in real time.
Nix-based development environments at Shopify
This video from Oct 2019 NixCon covers how Shopify is using Nix for internal developer tooling:
At Shopify, we have somewhere on the order of 1e3 developers, all using macOS laptops as primary development environments. We’re in the process of integrating Nix as the backbone of our tooling to provision as many of the development dependencies as possible, initially replacing Homebrew and parts of Bundler, but hopefully continuing to subsume more and more of our tooling.
This talk will demo the somewhat unconventional Nix workflow we’re using and some of the problems we had to solve to make it happen.
Introduction to Nix Flakes
An introduction to Nix Flakes. Flakes solve a couple of problems for Nix:
- ensuring reproducible evaluation of things like NixOS system configurations requires special care
- no standard way to compose Nix-based projects
- no easy way to deliver Nix-based projects to users
Of note: funded by Target, it’s interesting to see ecosystem advances get supported by enterprises that are using the tech.
Christine Dodrill on Nix
Dodrill has written a number of posts about Nix. The link we’ll share here is I was wrong about Nix, which in turn is a response to her own earlier post where she was a lot less positive on Nix 
And a few non-Nix links 
Real Cause of the “Sign in with Apple” Zero Day, Aaron Parecki
Aaron walks through the issues that caused the Sign in with Apple zero day, including common flows from other OAuth / OpenID apps and authenticators.
The simplistic reporting seemed to indicate that Apple was signing any JWT sent to them, but it wasn’t an issue with JWT directly.
Photopea gets to 1M files opened per day
Photopea is a free-to-use web based “Photoshop clone”. We use it ourselves, and are looking at building a Fission IPFS file plugin for it. They just celebrated 1M daily file opens:
https://twitter.com/photopeacom/status/1266456470842982400
Interview with Blaine Cook in Slate about early Twitter
Blaine was interviewed by Slate in What Twitter Should Have Done Differently From the Very Beginning
We really looked at Twitter and the tools that we were building as new media platforms that enabled voices of people that wouldn’t have had representation up until that point. So the idea was that there was the established corporate media and that the internet presented the opportunity to have different venues that weren’t controlled by the establishment, as it were.
Fission Updates
Tomorrow’s video chat is with the Tauri team, on building native desktop apps on web tech with Tauri and instrumenting with frida-trace. We shared Tauri in last week’s links. Join us Thursday, June 4, 2020 4:00 PM
We’ve got a first draft of a user level description of Fission Accounts in the Guide. Since we’re doing password-less login, there isn’t really a sign out:
A Fission app is more like an app that you download on your phone. When you don’t want the app anymore, you delete it.
Feedback welcome! (And soon you get to try it!)
Big Nix projects at Target and Shopify — seeing an ecommerce pattern here 