10-27, 17:50–17:55 (Europe/Berlin), Main stage
We’ll talk about the tradeoffs of global vs project based package managers and introduce Devbox by jetpack.io, a powerful open-source tool that leverages nix to create portable, reproducible environments.
In a world where developers might need to install 10 different versions of python to work on ML projects global package managers are no longer ideal. By associating system dependencies to individual projects Devbox can help with onboarding, dependency management, isolation and reproducibility of any project across different platforms and architectures.
Devbox is a tool that leverages the power of nix to create portable, reproducible environments. Devbox uses Devbox search, which indexes the entire history of nix packages to provide granular versions of hundreds of thousands of packages. Dependencies are organized by project and multiple projects can share dependencies but are not required to, allowing different versions per project. Dependencies are scoped by project so they are not leaked into the global environment and if a project is removed the nix garbage collector can safely remove all unused packages.
In the future, Devbox aims to expand beyond Nix, building tools that allow package creators harness nix-like properties without the nix learning curve, allowing us to expand the nix ecosystem and make its properties more accessible to developers everywhere.
Mike Landau is a full-stack software engineer with 13+ years of experience. He's worked at large companies (Facebook, Airbnb), started several startups (Storylane, Cut+Dry, Jetpack.io), and contributed to open source projects (devbox, launchpad, graphp). Some of Mike's areas of focus include improving developer productivity, helping engineering teams scale, and making writing code in large companies as productive and enjoyable as it is in small teams.