We're using Nix where I work as well, and while I can say it was not the most user-friendly to set up, once we got it in place it has reliably worked for the last two years.
We used to have a long and flaky shell script which set up the development environment for new engineers and CI machines (for iOS development on macOS, specifically). Now we have a very simple script which just installs nix and runs alls builds through the nix-shell. This makes builds on local machines and CI very easily reproducible. It also means that when dependencies change, we just update our nix config, and the new dependencies will automatically be fetched for all of our engineers and CI machines — no need to manually re-run the setup script.
This is my favorite part of Nix — you can do `nix-shell --run "<some command>"`, and it will make sure you have all of the correct dependencies (downloading if necessary), then run the command with those exact dependencies. This is especially magical when engineers working on other platforms have conflicting dependencies — a problem we no longer need to worry about.
We used to have a long and flaky shell script which set up the development environment for new engineers and CI machines (for iOS development on macOS, specifically). Now we have a very simple script which just installs nix and runs alls builds through the nix-shell. This makes builds on local machines and CI very easily reproducible. It also means that when dependencies change, we just update our nix config, and the new dependencies will automatically be fetched for all of our engineers and CI machines — no need to manually re-run the setup script.
This is my favorite part of Nix — you can do `nix-shell --run "<some command>"`, and it will make sure you have all of the correct dependencies (downloading if necessary), then run the command with those exact dependencies. This is especially magical when engineers working on other platforms have conflicting dependencies — a problem we no longer need to worry about.