Flox, Nix, and Reproducible Software Systems with Michael Stahnke

Flox, Nix, and Reproducible Software Systems with Michael Stahnke

Author: softwareengineeringdaily.com January 8, 2026 Duration: 55:16
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 Stahnke 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 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. Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by Flox.

For anyone curious about how the code running our world actually gets built, Software Engineering Daily offers a clear and consistent look behind the curtain. This isn't about hype cycles or surface-level news; it's a deep, technical conversation with the engineers, architects, and thinkers who are shaping our digital infrastructure. Each episode focuses on a specific technology, practice, or problem, breaking down complex systems into understandable parts. You'll hear detailed discussions on everything from database architectures and programming language design to the organizational challenges of scaling teams and the real-world trade-offs made in production systems. Hosted by softwareengineeringdaily.com, the podcast serves as a reliable source for developers who want to stay informed and inspired, translating the rapid pace of technological change into substantive, lasting knowledge. It’s for professionals who believe that understanding the "how" and "why" is just as important as knowing the "what." By dedicating time to thorough exploration, this podcast provides context that shorter formats simply cannot, making it an essential resource for anyone building the future, one line of code at a time. Tune in to hear unfiltered insights from the people on the front lines, discussing the tools and decisions that define modern software engineering.
Author: Language: en-us Episodes: 100

Software Engineering Daily
Podcast Episodes
Podman with Brent Baude [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 43:48
Podman is an open-source container management tool that allows developers to build, run, and manage containers. Unlike Docker, it supports rootless containers for improved security and is fully compatible with standards…
Electron and Desktop App Engineering with Shelley Vohr [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 52:04
Electron is a framework for building cross-platform desktop applications using web technologies like JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. It allows developers to package web apps with a native-like experience by bundling them with…
Modal and Scaling  AI Inference with  Erik Bernhardsson [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 40:55
Modal is a serverless compute platform that's specifically focused on AI workloads. The company’s goal is to enable AI teams to quickly spin up GPU-enabled containers, and rapidly iterate and autoscale. It was founded by…
RxJS with Ben Lesh [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 50:53
RxJS is an open-source library for composing asynchronous and event-based programs. It provides powerful operators for transforming, filtering, combining, and managing streams of data, from user input and web requests to…
Small AI Models with Yoeven Khemlani [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 42:20
JigsawStack is a startup that develops a suite of custom small models for tasks such as scraping, forecasting, vOCR, and translation. The platform is designed to support collaborative knowledge work, especially in resear…
Streamlining Cloud Infrastructure Deployments with Jake Cooper [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 43:25
Railway is a software company that provides a popular platform for deploying and managing applications in the cloud. It automates tasks such as infrastructure provisioning, scaling, and deployment and is particularly kno…
Building Open Infrastructure for AI with Illia Polosukhin [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 50:12
Illia Polosukhin is a veteran AI researcher and one of the original authors of the landmark Transformer paper, Attention is All You Need, which he co-authored during his time at Google Research. He has a deep background…
TypeScript with Jake Bailey [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 48:10
TypeScript is a statically typed superset of JavaScript that adds optional type annotations and modern language features to improve developer productivity and code safety. The TypeScript compiler performs type checking a…
MCP Security at Wiz with Rami McCarthy [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 56:07
Wiz is a cloud security platform that helps organizations identify and remediate risks across their cloud environments. The company’s platform scans layers of the cloud stack, including virtual machines, containers, and…