feat(web/website): add announcement blogpost

Change-Id: I68e9e832046c6e2e406ab24da2389b05c37de887

web/content/blog/2025-03-16-intro/index.md

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+---
+title: "Announcing Snix"
+description: "Announcing the Snix Project"
+date: 2025-03-16T15:32:28+00:00
+lastmod: 2025-03-16T15:32:28+00:00
+draft: false
+weight: 50
+categories: []
+tags: []
+contributors: []
+pinned: false
+homepage: false
+---
+
+## A New Chapter
+
+For a long time now, Tvix development has been a bit of a tug-of-war between
+differing priorities. The TVL community's side project, or Tvix as an end in its
+own right. The evaluator front and center, or castore as the major innovation.
+The repository itself, the contributor onboarding flow, and even the choice of
+IRC channel have laboured under these conflicting views of Tvix's future.
+
+Snix is where we're hoping to put this to a rest, on infrastructure and
+community dedicated to driving an innovative implementation of Nix forward.
+
+## Background
+
+While initially being homed in the TVL community, for a while now already,
+most Tvix development has been going on in a separate `#tvix-dev` IRC
+channel, with little overlap with TVL.
+
+Onboarding new contributors was hard in general:
+ - Newcomers had to clone the entire monorepo to contribute, bringing in a lot
+   of unrelated projects, that are confusing at best.
+ - Having all these projects made navigation hard, and changing some things in
+   one place caused regressions far away in another corner of the repository.
+ - Onboarding frequently required sending patches via email, as the SSO login
+   process was somewhat neglected.
+
+There's been different requirements on CI for Tvix and TVL:
+ - TVL overrides Nix to their 2.3 fork in their nixpkgs instance, which
+   frequently causes rebuilds for contributors, caused CI deadlocks in the
+   past, and most recently an entirely broken build for all contributors on
+   MacOS.
+ - Tvix has an extensive regression test suite, and nixpkgs bumps regularly
+   caused them to fail, requiring investigation. However, as some peoples'
+   system configurations are also in the monorepo, and they have an interest
+   in getting nixpkgs updates quickly, causing Tvix tests to frequently get
+   disabled, risking breakage of Tvix functionality.
+
+There have also been a few disagreements on which areas of Tvix development
+should be prioritized, and how certain things should be architected.
+
+# Snix
+
+Rather than continuing to navigate all these conflicting priorities, and
+spending lots of time coming up with a compromise both sides are not really
+happy about, I think it's better to put the project on its own legs, not only
+in terms of community, but also in terms of where it's hosted, using a new name,
+**Snix**.
+
+The fork will:
+
+ - allow tailoring the surrounding build infrastructure to the needs of Snix
+ - make contributions easier, allowing for a broader contributor base
+ - unblock some long-deadlocked decisions on the future of Tvix development
+
+We're excited to work with new and existing contributors to Tvix and other Nix
+implementations to drive a modular approach to Nix infrastructure forwards.
+
+Find us at [Contact]({{< ref "/contact" >}})