Hi, I'm Vic 👋

See my @denful Nix projects umbrella and my @vic random projects.

I'm a developer from Mexico City. I have been writing open source since 1999, and almost everything I know I learned by reading other people code. For me, sharing and creating things for others is an act of love, and that is the real reason I do this.

A little of my story

In 2023 I burned out. I stepped away from tech and gave myself time to breathe. I spent that season with poetry, with art (painting), with the study of religions, psychology and theology. I went deep into Daniel and Revelation (my fav books) and the study of prophecy for our times, and along that road I became in love with God, and a Seventh day Adventist.

That time gave me back something I had lost. I came back to my craft with more energy and more love than ever, and with a clear reason to do it: to make good things for people, create things for others, things that make the world a little better for nerds like me. And trying to convince people along the way that giving is an act of love.

I am also ~60% deaf, and a bit autistic maybe because of my disability. I have always built in the open, in writing. Open source has been my voice for many years, and the quiet, written, async nature of this work feels like home to me. Using computers and opensource to communicate with people has been a door into the world, I have met many wonderful people this way along the years. And I will always be in debt with all of them.

What I build

I have built OSS since 1999 most of my projects are driven by curiosity, by trying to explore and learn by doing. You can xplore all my project at my github profile.

These last two years I gave all my energy to Nix and to compiler tooling and effect systems, building tools for Nix people like me. It all started with a tiny import-tree utility, and since then exploring Nix and ways to make it better has been a passion for me.

Most of my work lives around den and a whole family of small Nix libraries, like with-inputs, flake-file, ned, zen, bend, nest and dnzl. Together they have more than 800 stars, they are used in production by people and teams around the world, and they are all free, tested, documented, and people are using these tools because they are useful to them, and that makes me so utterly happy.

And then there is dnx, the project closest to my heart and curiosity. dnx is a new high performance Nix runtime that I am building from the ground up. One optimal engine for reproducible builds, multi-language frontend, and for verifiable computation. Work is cached by its real meaning and not by a filename, it is parallel by construction, and it is libre always and for the public good. It is early, honest research software, and it is the most ambitious thing I have ever tried to build. dnx has been inspired a lot by projects I admire: Unison, Scala, Effekt, Nix, Lean4.

Why I am asking for your support

I am already giving everything I have to this. My time, my focus, and my own money and resources, building for people without demanding anything back. I do it gladly, because I believe in giving as an act of love.

Sponsoring me is simply a signal to help me keep doing it, and do it full time. I want to do it full-time, not only only on stolen nights. Specially dnx, which needs long, focused, uninterrupted time to become real. Your support goes straight into more hours on dnx and the rest of the ecosystem, better docs, faster fixes, real community help, and keeping all of it free and libre for everyone, forever.

My goal

My goal is 100 monthly sponsors. I know there are more than 100 awesome people on this world, and if you are reading this, you already are one of them. Any amount, big or small, brings me closer to dedicating myself fully to this work.

I am not asking because anyone owes me anything. I give freely, and I would love to receive the same freely, by your own decision, because of love, because we love what we can do for others.

Thank you for being here, and thank you for caring about open source. 🐊

Other ways to help

If sponsoring is not for you right now, that is completely fine. You can still help a lot by starring the projects you like, sharing them with your friends, opening issues, contributing code, or simply saying hi in the community. And please, sponsor other open source authors too. We are all in this together.

Peace, <3
-vic