So, I am one of those tech-affine parents, who wanted to build some kind of Jukebox device for their child. In this post I provide an overview of my specific jukebox implementation.

What I particularly like about Nix is its ability to encapsulate environments. No need to remember how to set up a certain environment, just encode it in a Nix expression, check it into version control and use nix-shell. This is especially useful when having to occasionally deal with certain environments, without being too familiar with the technical details. For me one such example is Jekyll, a Ruby application (and I am not familiar with Ruby).

In the following post I describe how a simple Haskell web application built on top of Reflex FRP can be deployed to a remote NixOS server. If a remote NixOS server is available using it for deployment can be cheaper alternative to commercial cloud providers in case the features of those (e.g. scaling, hosted services, availability guarantees, etc.) are not strictly required.

Servant is an awesome set of Haskell packages for Web development. Under the hood the Servant server uses WAI and Warp. Forunately, the package wai-conduit provides support for creating HTTP responses from Conduit sources, which also allow for streaming responses from within a Servant server.

I hacked together a very rudimentary PureScript binding for the PebbleJS API, which allows for the writing of Pebble applications using Javascript.