Summer of Nix is a coordinated effort to support selected free and open source software (FOSS) projects, by making them available as Nix packages or NixOS service modules. It is funded by the European Commission's Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiative through the NLNet Foundation and the NixOS Foundation.
This northern-hemisphere-summer program is a rare opportunity for students or early-career professionals with diverse technical skills and interests to practice disciplined software development with Nix while contributing to the public good and receiving some payment for it. Participation in Summer of Nix has been – for some – a pathway to attractive jobs in software development.
Learn more about Nix on nix.dev. Follow updates on Summer of Nix on the NixOS Discourse.
The program is designed for participants to work, learn, and meet:
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Improving the deployment story of software projects funded by the NLnet Foundation
Just writing the code is not enough: Programs have to be easy to obtain and run to be widely adopted. Getting complex software to work reliably on a whim is the aspiration for Summer of Nix.
As a participant, you will write Nix derivations, NixOS modules, integration tests, and documentation. And you will solve a lot of tricky problems on the way.
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Skill-sharing among participants
Making computers useful for a mass audience requires diverse skills and broad knowledge, and no one person has it all.
As a participant, you will learn from – and teach – your peers about widely used programming languages, software testing, technical writing, web design, and the Nix ecosystem with various its tools. You will closely collaborate in a group of five people on a regular schedule.
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Growing the Nix community
As a participant, you will join a community of more than 700 active contributors. You will engage in an open source software development workflow and take part in public technical discussion.
After successful participation, you will be invited to NixCon 2024, a conference for Nix users and developers from all over the world. And you will be afforded an opportunity for exposure with potential employers for whom Nix is a core strength.
- March: Organisers recruit mentors
- April: Mentors recruit participants
- Late May to early September: Work period with regular meetings
All details about applications will be announced here in the first months of 2025.
To be considered for participation, applicants must demonstrate:
- Fluency in English
- Essential programming skills, including proficiency with
- The command line
- Git version control
- At least one programming language
- Basic familiarity with Nix
Additionally, applicants have to:
- Meet the technical requirements
- Be available for a total of 160 hours of regular sessions over 13 weeks
To be considered for the mentor role, in addition to the requirements for participants, applicants must have:
- Merge access to Nixpkgs.
- Command of at least two widely-used programming languages
- Firm grasp of software development best practices
- Excellent control of Git
- Experience with leadership and teaching
- Fluency with the Nix language, the module system, NixOS tests, and related tools
We select for qualification and motivation, as well as for diverse perspectives and backgrounds.
People who identify as members of groups currently underrepresented in open source software development communities are particularly encouraged to apply. We put emphasis on establishing a safe, respectful, and inclusive environment where everyone can contribute their best.
Natural persons of legal age from anywhere in the world can apply.
| Role | Base stipend [EUR] |
|---|---|
| Participant | 3000 |
| Mentor | 5000 |
Residents of EU member states receive the base stipend. For residents of other countries, stipends are adjusted according to purchasing power parity relative to the Netherlands. See the list of stipends by country for exact amounts.
You must be able to receive payments via one of:
Effective remote collaboration requires being able to simultaneously share your screen, view others' screens, talk to each other, and compile software. This is only possible with sufficiently performant hardware, and therefore it's a condition for participation.
- Video camera
- Headphones and reasonable-quality microphone
- Consistently low-noise environment
- Enough processing power for multiple concurrent video streams
Please ask a friend to make a test call on Jitsi Meet to ensure that they can see your screen and hear you well.
- Sufficient bandwidth
- Stable throughout multiple hours of video call
From the organisers' experience, mobile data is unlikely to suffice.
Notifications are posted in the public Matrix room Summer of Nix Announcements. Set up your Matrix client to receive push notifications on new messages.
News about the program are published in the Summer of Nix Discourse category. Subscribe to receive push notifications or emails on new messages.
It depends. You are responsible for observing the laws that apply to you when receiving payments.
The stipend is compensation for work towards a non-profit cause. This means that in some jurisdictions it may be exempt from income tax, value-added tax (VAT), or from counting towards social insurance or health insurance obligations.
In some jurisdictions you may have to register a business to legally account for receiving payments.
Note that the stipend amount is exactly what the NixOS Foundation can pay. If you have to process VAT, the total expense for the NixOS Foundation still must be the stipend amount, even if you put "reverse charge" on the invoice.
No, Summer of Nix is an independent program organised by the NixOS Foundation. It is funded by the European Commission via the NLnet Foundation.
Summer of Nix was originally modeled after Google Summer of Code, but has developed its own profile. We use the purchasing power parity data from Google Summer of Code to calculate our stipends.
Unrelated, the Nix community applied for Google Summer of Code 2024 and Google Season of Docs 2024, where you can participate to directly improve tooling and documentation in the Nix ecosystem.
We do our best to select free and open source, privacy-respecting software. But this is not a hard constraint, nor the only criterion.
We use:
- GitHub for development and public technical discussion
- Matrix for private, ephemeral, or real-time communication
- Notion for accounting
As a participant, you will need an account on each of these services.
Responsible: Valentin Gagarin (program direction)
- GitHub: @fricklerhandwerk
- Matrix: @fricklerhandwerk:matrix.org
Open an issue to ask a question in public. Send direct messages on Matrix for questions that require privacy.
Accountable: Stichting NixOS Foundation (legal partner in the NGI Zero consortium, fiscal host)
Consulted and informed: Nix Community Steering Committee (governing body of the Nix ecosystem)