I’m building LabCraft, a hands-on learning platform for infrastructure and systems tools. The first course is Nix/NixOS.
I’m starting with Nix for two reasons.
First, it has been a major part of my own learning path over the past six years.
Second, it exposes a learning problem I’ve seen repeatedly: Nix is powerful, but many people meet it through terse docs, old examples, flakes that work before they make sense, and errors that assume the mental model they’re still trying to build.
A lot of people get stuck in the same places:
- shell and profile setup
- disabled experimental features
- confusing build errors
- copying working snippets without understanding the system underneath them
- not knowing whether the failure is their mistake, the tutorial’s, or an upstream change
LabCraft is built around those moments.
The course runs in a real VM, not a browser emulator. Learners break things, repair them, and get checked against what actually happened on the machine rather than quiz answers or exact command strings.
The longer writeup is here:
https://www.labcraft.dev/blog/introducing-labcraft
I’d especially value feedback from people who have learned Nix, taught it, onboarded a team to it, or watched people bounce off it.
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