Flox, Nix, and Reproducible Software Systems with Michael Stahnke

Modern software development is more complex than ever. Teams work across different operating systems, chip architectures, and cloud environments, each with its own dependency quirks and version mismatches. Ensuring that code runs reproducibly across these environments has become a major challenge that's made even harder by growing concerns around software supply chain security. Nix is a powerful open source package manager that builds software in controlled, declarative environments where dependencies are explicitly defined and reproducible. Its functional approach has made it a gold standard for reproducible builds, but it can also be difficult to learn and adopt. Flox is a company that builds on top of NICS with increased supply chain security and abstractions that streamline the developer experience. Michael Stankey is the VP of engineering at Flox and formerly worked at companies including Caterpillar, Puppet, and CircleCI. He joins the podcast with Kevin Ball to talk about Flox, building on top of nicks, how reproducibility underpins software security, the concept of secure by construction, how deterministic environments are reshaping both human and AI driven development, and much more. Kevin Ball, or K Ball, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He cofounded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI in action discussion group through Latent Space. Check out the show notes to follow Kbal on Twitter or LinkedIn, or visit his website, kball.llc. Michael, welcome to the show. Alright. Thanks for having me. Yeah. I'm excited to get to dig in. So let's maybe start a little bit with you. So can you introduce yourself, your background, and how you got to Flox? Sure. Yeah. My name is Michael Stonke. I'm currently the VP of engineering at Flox. And I've been involved in packaging and automation for most of my career. And so kind of what Flox does was a culmination of a lot of previous experiences. I had worked at big enterprise at Caterpillar, the construction company running data centers and system administration, doing a lot of automation there. Eventually, I left that company to go work with some friends who founded a company called Puppet. And Loved that back in the day. Yeah. It was pretty early on there. I really enjoyed it. Let's not have this bespoke automation. Let's have a framework for this and and really leverage out at scale when you're working with thousands of servers per administrator, things like that. Really enjoyed that. Did a lot of packaging, built a lot of things, and ended up doing a lot of porting and packaging, I guess. And packaging has been my passion for software the entire time. I love putting bits into nice orderly things that other people can consume. I founded a package repository called EPEL, which was the extra packages for enterprise Linux on top of Red Hat enterprise Linux in 2005. It was me and six other people that basically got …