Cool Coding Websites (CCWS)

A curated collection of interesting, tricky, and educational programming websites.

This entire website is a static site generated using pure Nix. There are no static site generators (like Hugo or Jekyll) involved, just Nix expression language generating HTML strings, managed via Flakes.

Why Nix? Because I can.

Prerequisites

To build and develop this project, you need:

1. Nix with Flakes enabled.
2. (Optional) direnv for automatic environment loading.

Getting Started

1. Enter the Environment

If you have direnv installed:

direnv allow

Otherwise, manually enter the Nix shell:

nix develop

2. Build the site

This will compile the Nix expressions into HTML files and output them to the ./result directory.

just build
# OR
nix build

After building, you can open result/index.html in your browser to view the site.

3. Run locally

You can run the project locally with a small Python script and automatic change detection.

just run
# OR
nix run

4. Development Commands

This project uses just as a command runner. Run just to see all available commands.

How to Add a Website

To add a new website, add a new attribute set in src/content.nix

{
  title = "Name of Website";
  link = "https://example.com";
  description = "A brief description of what makes this site cool.";
  tags = [
    "tag1"
    "tag2"
  ];
}

Tech Stack

• Language: Nix
• Templating: Nix String Interpolation (src/lib/elements.nix)
• Styling: CSS (src/style.css)
• CI/CD: GitHub Actions (configured in .github/workflows/quality.yaml)

Credits

Credit where credit is due.

• Emi for this great article
• Patryk Wychowaniec for his great example and app.py that I stole