Putting new ideas in community, exchanging opinions, replying to someone's else impressions, sharing public experiences, showing feelings about modern way of living, writing down notes on what’s going on from one’s side ... So many interesting and useful content around to share. The question is, how to do so simply and without complications ? How not to expend way too much time messing with tooling ? Is it yet possible to concentrate on what really matters, contents ? Here I summarize the way I’ve found to contribute to this blog, which fits best with my workflow.

Guix reveals as a practical means of handling dependencies. However, the amount of information available to start using it may appear as a bit overwhelming for a beginner, letting the feeling of a tool reserved to a reduced community or experts. Far from that. Here you’ll find everything you need to get started with guix, with a light touch on using it for #modernhw.

Once upon a time, in digital electronics design, we were used to moving huge zip files around including project data, code and all ancillary stuff along with it. We were doing backups, snapshots and versioning our code with help of compressed files. That’s the way it was, I knew that time, and you, young reader, would not believe me if I told you about the whole picture. This is not acceptable anymore.

#guix includes the concept of channels, or git repositories of package definitions. This gives a chance for anyone to complete the collection of packages provided by the distribution, in case this is not enough. Keep reading for an intro on how to create your own channels, or how to use the most popular third party guix channels around.

Digital hardware design implies dealing with a lot of scripts, configurations, packages, project files, documentation, specifications, bibliographies, data sheets, software, etc. and, of course, a lot of code. Each one comes with its own version history. This is not a problem, as we have #git. But when it comes to #dependencies between different sets, how do we handle the complexity ?

#modernhw, and in particular digital electronics design implies, for the most of it, writing #plaintext files. Creating code, scripts, configurations, documentation, emails, taking notes, handling bibliographic references, etc., all of these tasks involve writing in plain text files. Whether these files are created or modified, editing plain text is a must. An, when it comes to editing text, it is really worth investing some time on learning a bit more than the basics of a good text editor.