Skip the 6-month Nix & NixOS Ramp-Up
Our Nix and NixOS training saves valuable time and money by accelerating your team's ramp-up, reducing frustration with the complexity of Nix, and avoiding costly beginner's mistakes.
6 months ramp-up time in 1 week!
Feel productive, not frustrated!
Avoid beginner's mistakes from the start!
Turn your staff into competent, unstoppable Nix users
Testimonials
“Nix is a very promising technology, but I found it very difficult to get started. The Nixcademy helped me a lot to use Nix effectively in my work. The training has given me the practical skills I need to fully evaluate and use Nix.”
Christian Haar Audio/DSP Software-Engineer · Kemper
“The Nix & NixOS 101 class was exactly what I needed. As someone with a strong background in cybersecurity and software engineering, I appreciated how the course cut through the fragmented online resources and provided clear, practical guidance. It's been a fantastic introduction to Nix, and I'm excited to continue learning.”
Phillip Bosco CEO · Security Illusion, LLC
“Nixcademy has been a game-changer for me. Working with my mentor has been incredibly rewarding. Each session, I bring my Nix and NixOS ideas, and together, we make them work. The personalized guidance and in-depth education have boosted my skills tremendously. I highly recommend Nixcademy for anyone serious about mastering Nix.”
Chris O'Brien Software Developer · Versatus
“The Nix(OS) workshop was a valuable experience that has opened up many new possibilities for us in recent weeks. It was particularly impressive how easy it is to create reproducible environments for training neural networks with Nix. Thanks to the knowledge we learned, we have already been able to successfully create some packages and contribute to nixpkgs.”
Matthias Machine Learning Engineer · Fraunhofer IDMT
“Thank you very much for the good training, which has helped us a lot to use Nix independently in our projects! It is very well structured and very easy to understand if you have already been around the programming world for a while. The instructor communicated very well and hit the right rhythm to make it easy to listen and follow.”
Philipp Hauck Software Developer · ESG
“I am delighted with the course and the content! The tutor is competent and presents the course content in an understandable way and responds to spontaneous questions in detail. The many practical examples have opened up new ideas and horizons for me, which help me to do my work more efficiently in my day-to-day work. The training week was full of aha-effects, and enlightened my Nix world view on a broad basis”
Jürgen Lorff Software Developer · ESG
“As an app developer at Kodira, I recently had the opportunity to participate in nixcademy's Nix & NixOS training, and it was truly transformative for our team. Our customer required us to work with this intricate technology for a project and nixcademy's training provided us with the necessary expertise. The trainer's knowledge and ability to simplify complex concepts made the learning experience seamless. I thoroughly recommend nixcademy's trainings to my colleagues, as the week-long training, although challenging, has had a strong enabling effect on our daily work results. Thank you, nixcademy, for empowering us to conquer the complexities of Nix & NixOS.”
Marc W Software Developer · Kodira
“Choosing nixcademy for our NixOS trainings has been an invaluable building block in our Shift-Left Strategy at secunet. The trainings provided by nixcademy have not only enabled us to deliver more value to our customers at a faster pace but have also proven to be a cost-effective way to train our staff. The feedback we received from the clear majority of participants was overwhelmingly positive, further reinforcing our decision to partner with nixcademy. The customized training tailored to our specific needs has truly been exceptional. Without a doubt, I would happily purchase Nixcademy trainings again. Thank you for helping us empower our team and elevate our cyber security capabilities.”
David CTO Office · secunet Security Networks AG
“Having recently embarked on building our products with Nix & NixOS, the training provided by nixcademy has been a game-changer for our team. The steep learning curve was made manageable through the comprehensive and well-structured training program. The trainer's deep expertise and ability to simplify complex concepts made the learning process enjoyable and effective. The customized approach to our specific needs was highly appreciated, and although the training week was undeniably demanding, witnessing the empowering impact it had on our team makes it all the more rewarding. I wholeheartedly recommend nixcademy trainings to my colleagues in the industry.”
Boris Bierwald Lead Expert System Engineer · secunet Security Networks AG
“Jacek's invaluable support and expertise were instrumental in enabling my team to develop customized systems for sensor data collection and post-processing of measurements. His adept use of Nix for ensuring maintainability and quick deployments has been nothing short of remarkable. I may not fully comprehend the technical details, but my employees have consistently praised his exceptional teaching style and ability to communicate complex concepts in a clear and concise manner.”
René Renger CEO · Novus GmbH
“Jacek's technical expertise and dynamic teaching style have been a game-changer for my team as we navigate the fast-paced world of AI and mobile app development. As a service provider, we frequently need to create rapid proof of concepts with multiple moving parts that must be transformed into marketable products with lightning speed. Jacek's exceptional support has been an incredible asset, and I cannot imagine going back to our previous ways of working without him.”
Matthias Raaz CEO · Deep5 GmbH
Order a Nix/NixOS Training for Your Team Today
Why Train Humans in the AI Era?
We use LLMs every day, and your team should too. The point isn't that AI is bad at Nix — it's that AI gets dramatically better at Nix the moment your engineers can actually steer it. A short investment in fundamentals turns AI from an unreliable guesser into a real force multiplier.
LLMs still stumble on Nix
- Hallucinated APIs. Invented
nixpkgsattributes, invented module options, invented function signatures. Plausible — until you run it. - Mixed-up vintages. Pre-flake idioms welded onto flake syntax, old module options applied against current nixpkgs. Compiles in your head, fails in the evaluator.
- Outdated best-practice. Patterns the official docs explicitly warn against — because the upvoted Stack Overflow answer the LLM learned from never got deprecated.
Tooling like an MCP server feeding live nixpkgs data does close the first gap — but it doesn't help with mixed vintages, and it can't tell whether the patterns it's emitting were ever good practice. The model still delivers all of this confidently, with no warning that any of it is wrong.
Better questions, better answers
- You frame by concept, not symptom. "How do I add a patch to this derivation?" gets a sharp answer. "Why doesn't this build?" gets a guessing game.
- You spot bad answers fast. When you actually know what overlays are for, it's obvious when the AI proposes one for a problem that needs
overrideAttrs. - You iterate productively. A trained engineer steers the model through three follow-ups to a working solution. An untrained one ships the first plausible answer.
An engineer who understands derivations, the module system, and overlays gets dramatically better output from the same AI than someone copy-pasting prompts.
Someone has to grade the output
- Evaluation that crawls. Minutes-to-hours instead of seconds, because the LLM nested IFD or broke laziness.
- Cache misses everywhere. What should hit your binary cache rebuilds from source because inputs aren't pinned the way Nix expects.
- Package and image bloat. Multi-gigabyte system images that should be a few hundred megabytes — debug symbols, dev dependencies, or wrong closure references slipped in.
Catching these takes a trained human in the loop. That's the engineer your team is missing.
Train your team to be the human-in-the-loop your AI workflow needs
📞 Talk TrainingWhy Nixcademy?
The Hidden Cost of Self-Taught Nix
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Months of half-productive engineers. Self-taught Nix typically means 3–9 months of partial productivity per developer. That's a quarter of a year of full salary for half the output — multiplied across your team.
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Failed Nix rollouts fail quietly. Teams rarely fight Nix. They just stop using it. One frustrated engineer says "this isn't working," leadership quietly agrees, and months of investment evaporate. The migration that gets shelved costs more than the one that gets done right.
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Frustration becomes turnover. Untrained engineers blame the tool. The senior person who finally cracks Nix on their own is also the one most likely to leave for a company with proper Nix tooling — taking the institutional knowledge with them.
Most Nix Courses Don't Stick
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Watching ≠ knowing. Video courses and tutorials feel productive but rarely transfer to your codebase. Most learners abandon them in week two — and the ones who don't still hit a wall the first time their problem doesn't match the tutorial's.
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One-shot workshops fade fast. A single intense day gives you confidence you can't reproduce a week later. Without reinforcement through actual project work, the brain prunes anything that wasn't applied.
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We track outcomes six months out. Post-class surveys plus follow-ups half a year later are the only honest way to know if training stuck. Our results are why referrals are our biggest sales channel — not why we charge more.
↳ Class Goals ⛳
Nix Punishes the Wrong Order of Learning
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The wrong starting point burns weeks. Beginners who jump into flakes before understanding derivations spend weeks confused by errors that aren't really about flakes. With Nix, the order of topics matters as much as the topics themselves.
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Anti-patterns calcify fast. Once an engineer "solves" something with a bad pattern that works, they reuse it everywhere. Months later your codebase is full of
import (fetchGit ...)and overlay misuse — and unwinding it is harder than doing it right the first time. -
Concentrated beats drawn-out. Spreading Nix learning across "one hour every Friday afternoon" fails — the concepts depend on each other. A focused week beats a quarter of context-switching every time.
Bad Teaching Is Worse Than No Teaching
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One bad lecture poisons the well. Engineers who suffer through dense, un-curated Nix content don't become engineers "who need more Nix." They become engineers convinced Nix is fundamentally broken — and that opinion travels through your team like a virus.
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Mixed backgrounds need adaptive teaching. Your team has senior infra people, a frontend dev forced to touch a flake, and someone who'd rather use Docker. A lecture pitched to one group is invisible to the other two. Our format adapts in real time to who's actually in the room.
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Trained trainers, not internet-famous solo acts. Knowing Nix well ≠ being able to teach it. Our trainers are vetted on their teaching, not on their GitHub stars.
↳ Meet the Trainers 👋
What Did Customers Say?
When asked anonymously "What did you like best?" after the training
“I finally feel like I understand nix from base principles.”
Anonymous United States
“I've had poor experiences with training weeks in the past where the content ended up not being engaging or applicable, so I came into this thinking I would feel the same way. However, I was presently surprised very quickly on day 1. I could tell we were going to learn a ton and that we did! I left the week wishing we had more time. It was fun. Lots of practical examples.”
Anonymous United States
“Every aspect of the Nix training was directly embedded into a practical exercise. The trainer completely knows what he is talking about. There are no stupid questions, everybody was able to get along with their own pace, but at the end, everybody was at the same knowledge level.”
Anonymous Germany
“I liked the mix of theory and practice. Also, the pace was perfect for me. I struggled a little, but that's fine, because that implies, that learning happens.”
Anonymous Germany
- Content was extremely applicable and ordering of content was on-point
- Engaging
- I was honestly very impressed by the teacher's technical acumen
Anonymous United States
- Content was extremely applicable and ordering of content was on-point
- Engaging
- I was honestly very impressed by the teacher's technical acumen
- Many real life examples
- Knowledge of the trainer
- Good/open environment in terms of possibility to ask questions
- Mixture of theory and practise
Anonymous Germany
- Many real life examples
- Knowledge of the trainer
- Good/open environment in terms of possibility to ask questions
- Mixture of theory and practise
“I really liked the learning it the hard way approach of having simple problems to solve without having every single bit of information needed to solve them at the time -- forcing you to actually think about the problem and how to obtain the needed docs. The moments of realization this approach trigger are truly helpful to learning -- and the solutions provide a nice long-term reference to go back to when needed.”
Anonymous Germany
“Style: The mix of Hands on, theoretical foundations and background stuff combined with just playing around and testing out things.”
Anonymous Germany
“Just a ton of information to take in a short period of time. It felt like a semester of school in one week.”
Anonymous United States
- Good mix of theory and exercises.
- Very competent trainer.
- Order of topics was good (topics built on each other). Clear structure.
- NixOS Training came at the right time (interesting field and knowledge is needed in this field).
Anonymous Germany
- Good mix of theory and exercises.
- Very competent trainer.
- Order of topics was good (topics built on each other). Clear structure.
- NixOS Training came at the right time (interesting field and knowledge is needed in this field).
“The presenter was clearly experienced and enthusiastic on the topic. We managed to address a wide scope of different topics. The prepared exercise material was helpful to quickly focus the important aspects of an exercise. The journey through the field was well structured, logical and put clear focus.”
Anonymous Germany
Order a Nix/NixOS Training for Your Team Today
Class Goals
Learn Nix
- Define declarative dev environments
- Create reproducible, cacheable packages
- Manage, patch, pin dependencies
- Cross-compile projects
- Extend nixpkgs with complex overlays
- Create your own corporate package set
Learn NixOS
- Maintain NixOS setups on servers, cloud, laptops
- Define containers, VMs, custom installers
- Update and evolve systems without risk
- Create your own configurable NixOS modules
- Define powerful declarative integration tests
- Create your own corporate Linux distro
Class Content
Using Nix
- Installing Nix
- Ad-Hoc Nix Shells
- Package Management
- Garbage Collection ♻️
Nix Language Basics
- Nix Language ㊙️
- Importing Nixpkgs
- Derivations
Input Determinism
- Importing from Nix PATH
- Pinning Inputs 📌
- Tooling for Pinning 🧰
Stdenv Basics
- mkDerivation
- Fetching Code 🧲
- Trivial Builders 🏗️
- Language-Specific Builders
Basic Nix Patterns
- Project Structure
- callPackage 📞
- Anti-Patterns
Advanced Stdenv
- Source Filtering
- Cross Compilation
- Patching Code
Package Overrides
- Overlays
- Overlay Composition
- Anti-Patterns
Flakes ❄️
- Why Flakes
- Enabling Flakes
- Flake Structure
NixOS
- Installing NixOS
- NixOS Modules
- Config Examples
- Patterns
- Integration Tests
Frequently Asked Questions
No matter if you need a crash course or training on specific advanced topics: We can provide you a customized Nix training that exactly fits your team's needs.
You get the best training experience and connection between teacher and participants when we provide the class on-site in your office. We can also organize the training in an online meeting solution of your choice.
No. We also provide trainings for private and corporate individuals in our mixed online classes! Please visit shop.nixcademy.com for more information. If you are a hackerspace, school, or university, please reach out to sales for a special discount.
Didn't find your answer in the FAQ? Contact us! 📲