Project Final Wheel
hello there, I hope this won't end up as another one of my Failed List [1]. This is yet another effort to make myself useful and do something that has an impact in improving student lives in NITC. I was able to help form a community GLUG NITC with the help of my homies from FOSSCell to help out noobies to learn and survive GNU/Linux, get better at using a computer and find solution for their softwares related and unrelated to academics. 2 years back I tried to build unbOS[2] along with B22 students, and it failed miserably. It was mostly Fueled by DebConf Kochi that happened in 2023 September and we tried building an OS that has everything out of the box and in a plug and play manner for all departments, course streams. Now 2 years later I have found interest and started understanding the magic of nix. I use it to power my work laptop running Mac OS and managed to make it reproducible to an extend with nix-darwin. My home server is running nixos and I love the usage of nix modules. I still remember how my 12 teacher explained abstraction / encapsulations etc while teaching turbo C++ . Gotta say I didn't think that concepts will make my life easier. nix modules are a blessing... think of it like this.. you have a course called introduction to C. it's course code is CS1001 by building on top of nix you could ideally write a module for it and then later for a user they can simply set
courses.cs1001.enable = true
and all the resources they need will magically be made available and setup in their PC.
In reality this is not magic, it's the power of modules. refer to nixos modules. And I plan on making a whole bunch of them tailored for NITC.
Modern IT infrastructure currently revolves around big corps. we all become consumers and they build the stuff we think we need. out of 100 people maybe the 1 person will struggle and find the key for having the optimal setup for a specific course, they might or might not share them with their friends, yet those solutions might not get passed down and be lost into /dev/null again and again someone has to keep reinventing the wheel endlessly.
With project Final Wheel I hope to get volunteers and build another community preferably on top of GLUG NITC itself to Engineer more NITC specific Modules and improve nixos adoption, and put an end to reinventing the wheel to an extend. As a community of 6000 + students / researchers and Faculties I hope I can bring maybe the 100 tech savvy and computer geeks to help make the rest of the NITC community's life easier. A socialist way of software building one could say
with the philosophy in place I shall try and explain the roadmap / action plan below.
Roadmap | Checklist
- Find and tabulate all the courses offered, their syllabi, softwares and tools needed for all those courses below.
Action Plan
Will keep adding on to this.