Who am I?

I am Squirrel Modeller, a computer science student currently studying towards becoming a civil engineer.

Why "Modeller"? Well, I started my Blender journey roughly over a decade ago. Ever since then, I've enjoyed sculpting architecture, replicating real-life locations, and generally experimenting with 3D modelling. From this, you could infer that I am comfortable handling the pipeline from 3D assets to game engine integration. This also includes experience optimizing asset usage, batching, LODs, and texture atlasing.

What excites me most are technologies like Nanite in UE5, which render many of these optimisation methods a thing of the past. I love the thought of unleashing creativity to the fullest without being held back by technical limitations.

My Nix journey

I write a lot of code, and over time I've developed a strong preference for systems that behave predictably. A function should return the same result every time given the same input. That level of determinism is what makes software reliable.

Naturally, this raises the question: why don't we expect the same from the systems we run our software on? The operating system is not just a tool in the background - it is something we interact with constantly. It shapes how we work, what we can build, and how efficiently we can move between tasks.

In practice, traditional setups fall short of this ideal. I rely on a specific development environment: an IDE (the program used to write and manage code), with a consistent set of plugins, language versions, and tools. Recreating that environment across multiple machines is tedious and often inconsistent. Different operating systems ship different versions of software, updates introduce breaking changes, and subtle mismatches accumulate over time.

These are tools, and tools should not behave unpredictably. A workflow should not degrade simply because a package updated or a machine differs slightly from another.

This is where Nix entered the picture.

With Nix, I can declare my entire environment, from system configuration to individual development dependencies as code. Instead of manually setting up each machine, I describe exactly how it should be configured, and that definition is reproduced identically everywhere.

This extends beyond just installing programs. Configuration, plugins, and even cryptographic keys are managed declaratively. When something changes, I update it once, and that change propagates across all systems in a controlled and reproducible way.

It also fundamentally changes how I approach projects. Previously, I would default to working on a single machine simply because reproducing the setup elsewhere was too time-consuming. Now, with Nix flakes and direnv, each project defines its own environment. If it works on one machine, it works on all of them, whether it's macOS or Linux.

The result is a workflow where the environment is no longer a source of friction. It becomes stable, portable, and predictable. That is exactly what I expect from any well-engineered system.