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 Nix, with increased supply chain security

and abstractions that streamline the developer experience. Michael Stanky is the VP of Engineering

at Vlox and formerly worked at companies including Caterpillar, puppet, and Circle

CI. He joins the podcast with Kevin Ball to talk about Vlox, building on top of Nix, 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 co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup,

and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through latent space.

Check out the show notes to follow KBall on Twitter or LinkedIn, or visit his website, k to the show.

All right. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, I'm excited to get to dig in.

So let's maybe start a little bit with you.

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