2026-02-04, 14:00–18:00, B.3.036
In this hands-on workshop, we will use Flox to introduce the core concepts and advantages of the Nix ecosystem without requiring participants to learn the Nix language or climb its steep learning curve. We will start by tackling the classic “works on my machine” problem and show how Flox environments create consistent and reproducible setups across laptops, CI systems, and production hosts. After that foundation is set, we will explore advanced environment features such as layering, composition, version pinning, and secret management. These examples will give participants practical patterns they can apply immediately in their own workflows.
Once everyone has a solid grasp of environments, we will move into packaging and deployment. Participants will learn how to build software with Flox, how to manage reproducible artifacts, and how to run those environments reliably using systemd or Kubernetes. Along the way, we will occasionally look under the hood to show where Nix concepts appear and where Flox intentionally simplifies them with more guided workflows. By the end of the workshop, attendees will have working environments, a clear mental model of how Nix-style reproducibility functions, and enough hands-on experience to decide how Flox can improve their current development or automation practices.
Michael Stahnke is an engineering executive, having spent the last 15 years working in the development and operational tooling space where also did research and was an author on Puppet’s State of DevOps Reports.
Michael is VP of Engineering at Flox. He was previously in senior engineering leadership at CircleCI and Puppet. Where he grew engineering teams by 5x or more. He spent time building high performing teams, organizations and researching engineering effectiveness. He’s been speaking at DevOps, Security, and Automation events since 2007. He founded the package repository Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) and wrote a book on OpenSSH in 2005.