2026 DEF CON 34 Nix Vegas

August 7, 2026

Ethan Carter Edwards


2026 DEF CON 34 Nix Vegas

I fulfilled a childhood dream of mine - attend DEF CON! Not only that, I'm very excited to say that I gave two presentations on Nix while there!

I'm also very grateful that exa.ai allowed me to present what I've been working on this summer + provided support for me to attend the conference with my team.

August 7th, 2026 - Let's Talk About Caching - Tarball Cache Presentation

My first presentation was a lightning talk about an s3-backed microservice that I wrote that acts as a proxy or pull-through cache for Git forge tarballs. It supports GitHub, GitLab, Sourcehut, and Codeberg, and the design is very simple.

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Link to tarball cache source code

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August 8th, 2026 - Infra as DAG Presentation

My second presentation was a longer, 45 minute talk about how using Nix to model infrastructure and deployments as DAGs (Directed Acyclic Graph)s. There isn't any handout code, but the presentation details a few different designs and how I thought about creating the ideal Nix setup for a web scale monorepo.

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Link to slides source