Back in March I was at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE) in Pasadena and I had to go directly from there to Bangkok to get to FOSSAsia.

Now I’m not a very vain person, but on long flights trying to get some sleep in economy my hair tends to get messed up, so I usually carry a baseball cap to wear when we land. But I forgot to bring one.

My friends Ron Efroni and Ross Turk over at Flox were also at the conference so I asked them for a cap. The main Flox color is purple, and in the words of Prince “I love purple” so I was eager to get one.

They were out.

But Ron promised to send me one, and not only did I get that but I got a whole Flox Box.

Even though I don’t identify as a developer, I’m a big fan of Flox. I’m old enough to remember when code came in the form of a paper magazine and I learned to type by entering BASIC listings into my home computer. Then came compilers, and along with compilers, libraries.

Lots of libraries.

The project I worked on for most of my professional life was a large Java application. I just looked and in the library directory there are 915 jar files.

Managing those different libraries became difficult, so we adopted Apache Maven. Maven handles dependencies, but it also introduced some randomness in that the library versions in a particular developer’s environment might differ slightly from those in the cache of another developer. In some cases this lead to the dreaded “well, it works on my machine”.

Several attempts have been made to bring reproducibility and portability to developer environments. One of the most popular is NixOS. Nix and NixOS have been around for awhile, but they have recently gained traction as development teams become larger and more distributed. Plus, while many workloads are now run “in the Cloud” a lot development is still done on individual computers before moving to production. The ability to accurately reproduce code and make it portable is now a requirement.

Flox was created to help organizations adopt Nix at scale, and they are also active contributors to the project. At the other SCaLE, there was an entire day devoted to Nix and the energy in the room made me miss my startup days.

I just looked in my old e-mails and I’ve known Ross since 2007, when he was at Sourceforge. I met Ron in 2023, and I love it when our paths cross.

And I love my Flox Box. It showed up packed with goodies.

I got a nice card, three (!) hats, a T-shirt, stickers, a notebook and pen, and some chocolate in wrapped in Flox purple. Note that it being high summer in the South the chocolate had seen better days but I ate it anyway (grin).

The only thing missing were Pogs. Ross always hands me a couple when I see him, but I guess I really don’t deserve any more since I misplaced some that he gave me. As someone with mild OCD this bothers me and I will find them, but I did find a couple he gave me the last time we were together.

Anyway, this was totally unexpected and just goes to show you the awesomeness of the Flox folks. I asked for a hat and got much more, and this philosophy of exceeding expectations is what makes Flox a company to watch.