Rok Garbas

Engineer @FloxDev | 20+ yrs DevOps & Release Eng | Ex-Mozilla | I build tools then help people use them | Nix community | Ljubljana

[Flox @floxdevelopment]

https://t.co/yRnXiq95n4 supports distributed teams across 100+ countries. But growth exposed familiar problems:

⚠️ Inconsistent dev environments
⚠️ “Works on my machine” failures
⚠️ Slower onboarding + rising release risk

With Flox, Fellow standardized reproducible environments across the SDLC without changing how engineers work.

Result: faster onboarding, higher velocity, fewer fire drills, and a more reliable path from dev → CI → prod.

“Flox gives us a dependable foundation so we can move fast with tight feedback loops.” — Samuel Cormier-Iijima, CTO & Co-Founder

Case study in comments.

[Rok Garbas @garbas]

@domenkozar @ocean_sprint Worst software ever!

[Rok Garbas @garbas]

@lucperkins May I say ...

[Rok Garbas @garbas]

I've spent most of my career building developer tools. And right now the whole DevEx market is changing in ways that are hard to ignore.

A senior engineer with Claude Code can prototype in a week what used to take a team a quarter. Companies that used to buy dev tools are building them in-house, and honestly it's becoming the rational choice. That's just one of the pressures.

But what I keep coming back to is something I didn't expect. The tools that lasted in my career were never the technically best. They were the ones where real trust existed between the people making the tool and the people using it. Not trust in code. Trust in humans.

AI can reproduce features. Someone can clone your tool with a test suite and an afternoon. But that relationship? Hard to prompt your way into. Maybe the moat was never the code.

The DevEx market is going to change. But we've been here before. This wave might be bigger, but nothing we can't handle. We're makers. Adapting is what we do.

https://t.co/c8HqsgujaJ

[Rok Garbas @garbas]

What do chefs and Nix engineers have in common?

We both obsess over a clean kitchen.

A good chef doesn't prevent burnt steaks by controlling every second. They keep the kitchen clean. Ingredients fresh, knives sharp, everything in its place. The creative parts figure themselves out.

I've been doing reproducible builds for 20 years. Locked deps, pinned environments, deterministic tooling. Got into it because "works on my machine" was driving me crazy.

Then AI showed up and something funny happened. All that plumbing turned out to be exactly what AI needed too. You can't make AI deterministic. But if everything around it is locked down, you actually know when something goes wrong whether it's the AI or your environment playing tricks.

20 years of clean kitchens and I was accidentally building the best AI strategy the whole time.

https://t.co/yrJlaXqyyk

[Flox @floxdevelopment]

Just in time for @NVIDIA GTC, we’re announcing the Flox CUDA Kickstart Program! 🎉

The program defines a reference architecture for deploying deterministic, reproducible CUDA-accelerated ML/AI environments on NVIDIA GPU infrastructure at scale.

It reflects Flox’s collaboration with NVIDIA and the Nix ecosystem to strengthen the open infrastructure around CUDA and make reproducible AI environments easier to deploy and run at scale.

Read the announcement: https://t.co/zus0DnUBIz

If you're at #GTC, come see us at booth #4046!

[Domen Kožar @domenkozar]

American friends, we're going to organize a Nix sprint in Mexico over the summer.

Rent a villa near a surf beach, do a bunch of brainstorming, hacking and enjoying tacos.

Who's in?

[Rok Garbas @garbas]

Lots of people saying the best way to extend Claude Code is through CLI tools, not MCP. I agree. But the CLI tools we write for humans don't work well for agents.

We see it every day. Claude Code tries a command, can't make sense of the output, tries different flags, loops a few times. Eventually figures it out or gives up. Tools work fine, just not designed for this user.

Went looking for https://t.co/shCRJFRjqi but for AI agents. Couldn't find anything. So I wrote my own checklist.

One thing that surprised me: output markdown, not JSON. Sounds wrong, but LLMs don't json.loads() your output. They read text, and they're way better at markdown than nested JSON. Didn't see that coming.

https://t.co/hIiHDKJIkr

[Rok Garbas @garbas]

PlanetNix 2026 is behind us. Almost double the size from last year and I'm still catching up on sleep.

Helped organize and gave a workshop on getting Nix into teams where most people won't ever learn Nix. 40+ people in the room, which was great, but the thing I keep thinking about is something else.

Even the most hardcore Nix people got it. Like, the people who live and breathe flakes every day looked at the problem and said yeah, we can't expect everyone to learn this. And that's fine. Did not expect that from this crowd.

Anthropic, Nvidia, Spotify - all there, all using Nix. Not trying it out. Actually using it. With AI moving as fast as it is right now, reproducible infrastructure underneath stops being a nice-to-have pretty quickly.

Nix + Kubernetes was a hot topic. @lovesegfault from Anthropic showed rio-build (distributed Nix builds on K8s) and @devusb talked about Flox on Kubernetes. Different approaches, same direction. Talking to people about where this is going... can't wait to see what comes out of it.

Event is done but we're far from finished. Videos, interviews, all of it still coming.

Were you there?

@planetnix @floxdevelopment

[Rok Garbas @garbas]

@domenkozar Time to start a new trend I guess.

I have some catchy names but better not share them publicly in case somebody takes me seriously 😜

[Rok Garbas @garbas]

You know Nix. Your team doesn't. You've tried explaining it. You've shared the docs. You've made the pitch. They smiled politely and went back to Docker.

I've been there. Stop trying to convert everyone. Give them Flox instead.

Flox gives your teammates reproducible environments in minutes - no Nix knowledge needed, no Nix expert needs to be around. And it coexists with your Nix setup.
You keep your flakes, they get a tool that _just works_.

Some will eventually get curious about Nix. Some never will. Both are fine. The point is your whole team gets reproducible builds without the 6-month learning curve.

I'm running a workshop at PlanetNix on exactly this:

"Flox 101: You Know Nix. Your Team Doesn't. Now What?"
March 5-6, Pasadena (co-located with SCaLE)

https://t.co/T4xZqFuZfA

[Rok Garbas @garbas]

Yaaay Android support is here.

Now only Linux platform is needed and then all team could be using it.

@WisprFlow Do you maybe have any ETA for this? Happy to test it for you.

[Rok Garbas @garbas]

@domenkozar @devenv_nix Imagine if 25min becomes a slow response in the future 😜

[Rok Garbas @garbas]

@WisprFlow just showed me what I said most in 2025.

Go-to phrase: "Let's commit the changes"
In @mitchellh's Ghostty: "Please review and commit"

I was hoping it would say "talking to my wife."

Nope. Just git.

[Rok Garbas @garbas]

PlanetNix CFP closes in ~12 hours.

If you use Nix, you probably hate talking about it. Never mention it at work. Never bore friends with "let me tell you about reproducible builds." Definitely never submit a talk about it.

Unless...?

I've been going to SCaLE the last 2 years and it's become one of my favorite conferences. Nice mix of community and commercial - people running things in production talking to people building the tools. No corporate nonsense. Just real conversations, good coffee, and since we're in LA - great burritos.

PlanetNix brings that energy to Nix. March 5-6 in Pasadena, right before SCaLE kicks off.

https://t.co/T4xZqFuZfA

[Flox @floxdevelopment]

#PlanetNix 2026: First Speakers Announced!

We’re excited to welcome our first speakers to Planet Nix 2026:

⭐ Kelsey Hightower
⭐ Priya Ananthasankar
⭐ Stormy Peters
⭐ @ronefroni

And we’re just getting started!

Planet Nix is a two-day gathering for builders across the #Nix universe, co-located with #SCALE happening on March 5–6 in Pasadena. Talks, workshops, hands-on sessions… all welcome.

If you’ve learned something worth sharing, we’d love to hear from you. 😎

All experience levels encouraged.

👉 Link to the CFP in the thread!

[Rok Garbas @garbas]

There must be a psychological paper somewhere titled:

⟨ “ The Developer’s Obsession with Dotfiles — A Case Study in Control and Chaos.” ⟩

Because honestly… I can’t stop tweaking mine.
... one more alias
... one more config line
... one more “perfect” setup

Is it about control? Identity? The joy of optimization?
Or maybe just the dopamine hit when everything finally works perfectly?

Why do we do this? Anyone got a theory?

[Rok Garbas @garbas]

We made it to DevOpsDays Warsaw! 🇵🇱

If you’re around today or tomorrow, come hang out with us — me, Tanja, and Joanna from the Flox team are here and would love to meet you.

Let’s talk about things that make developers smile (or sometimes cry 😅):
🟣 Reproducible dev environments
🟣 Getting your team started with Nix
🟣 How Flox can take the rough edges off

…or just drop by our “Dev Therapy” corner — a safe space to vent about dependency hell, flaky builds, and “it works on my machine” moments. Just good conversations with fellow devs who’ve been there too.

Come say hi 👋

#DevOpsDays #Warsaw #Flox #Nix #DevTools

[Rok Garbas @garbas]

🕯️ Honestly, the older I get, the more I’m okay with “boring” workflows that just work.

My current loop (yes, biased — I work at Flox):
1️⃣ `flox init` → define the env.
2️⃣ Code like I normally would.
3️⃣ `flox containerize` → container that matches my environment.

🪄 No hunting through Dockerfile drift.
⚖️ No “dev image ≠ prod image” mysteries.

🤔 Do you use any boring tools that I should know about?

#Workflow #DevTools #Containers #DevTeam

[Rok Garbas @garbas]

@elonmusk Luda Kucha