During January 2025, Ian Duncan focused on enhancing reliability and configurability in backend systems using Nix and Rust. In the temporalio/sdk-core repository, Ian addressed a configuration issue by updating the ephemeral server to use a dedicated database filename argument, ensuring correct database association and reducing misconfiguration risk. Concurrently, in the cachix/devenv repository, Ian introduced a dynamic runtime configuration pathway for the Temporal server, allowing key-value pairs to be passed as command-line arguments and enabling runtime behavior changes without redeployment. This work demonstrated depth in backend development, configuration management, and DevOps, delivering targeted improvements to core infrastructure tooling.