I have now spent the past 5 years helping software developers and scientists to build and distribute their software. It’s incredibly rewarding to hear all of the stories of how much easier we’ve made the setup process for complex tools. And seeing the adoption by big-name players like NVidia, Intel or AWS is still surreal.

Building software should not be a pain, and it should not involve many layers of tooling. It should be reliable, fast and easy. That is the holy grail we are chasing with Pixi. And it is important to note that we are not focusing on a single programming language or operating system – we deal with Python, C/C++, Rust, R, Lua and any other language on Windows, macOS and Linux.

My personal goal: being able to distribute open source software that runs natively on your system, easily. And there is a backstory: many years ago I wrote a little GTK application for Markdown editing. It was a nightmare to package it for Ubuntu back then (having to deal with GPG keys, uploading to a PPA, …). And I had no idea how to get this done on macOS or Windows. We’re not there yet, but Pixi will be able to help! FreeCAD is an amazing example how Pixi can be used to build amazing open source software.

The majority of users of Pixi today are scientists. Let’s be clear - there could not be a happier place for me than serving scientists and doing our little part to improve research. In my opinion, every paper and scientific software should be reproducible and easy to use (“academic code” should be a thing of the past). Pixi is helping here – the reproducible lockfile and the task system mean that we know exactly what to install and how to execute it.

Most of Prefix has a background and a passion for robotics, with initiatives like Robostack and our build-system, we think we can make a real dent here too. By allowing roboticicst to focus on what is important. Making robots that make an impact on the world.

I hope that you find Pixi useful, and that you, too, will become a part of the amazing open source community of conda-forge. The goal of conda-forge is to build all software into packages - there are no limitations. At prefix.dev we are working tirelessly to improve the tools that package maintainers are using – they are the giants on whose shoulders we stand. It can be incredibly rewarding to package some software. We are trying to write more documentation to grow conda-forge without bounds.

Open source is incredibly valuable to me. But to use open source, you need to be able to get it. We need to make it insanely easy to install the open source software we love and Pixi and conda-forge help with that. 

Of course, we are also a company. We have insane ideas on where we want to take Pixi environments. If you need to spin up a Pixi environment to run some computations or compile some code we will be able to help – we are building our commercial product “Pixi Instant Envs”. With Pixi Instant Envs you will be able to run workloads seamlessly locally, in the cloud, on your own premises or in a HPC cluster. If you want to get early access to our prototype, please reach out.

Thanks for reading,