Zach Mitchell (@zmitchell)
Hey, I'm Zach. I'm a software engineer and a professional curler[^1]. I'm also a CPython contributor[^2].
Background
My background is physics, but that's not what I do anymore because lasers don't have unit tests or version control. I did a PhD building various kinds of laser spectrometers to study how energy moves between molecules (specifically inside proteins involved in photosynthesis). The lasers I built spit out pulses of light as short as 20 femtoseconds (femto = 10^-15), and sometimes they even worked! I also did quantum mechanics simulations. If you call me "doctor" I'll simultaneously feel extremely uncomfortable and proud. Do with that what you will.
I developed an interest in systems programming during my PhD, and now I spend my free time doing things like building eBPF-based profilers (like everyone else). I feel at home in Rust and Zig, but I spent several years knee-deep in Python. I have a healthy fear of C++, and C macros scare me a little bit. It's my professional opinion as a doctor that header files should be illegal.
I spent about 9 months on the Nix documentation team (if you've seen the documentation you'll understand why). I don't do that anymore, but I do still use Nix to configure all of my machines (yes, even my macOS laptop). You can see my Nix configurations here: zmitchell/nixos-configs. I'm the program chair for the Nix conference that takes place in North America every year.
Work
I work at Flox building something that's hard to do justice in a single sentence. I work on both the CLI and the backend server. The CLI is open source and can be found here: flox/flox.
Flox is a tool for creating reproducible "environments". If you use it during development, it's a developer environment. If you use it in CI, it's a CI environment. If you use it in production, it's a production environment. It's a way of getting the same set of software everywhere that you use it. macOS or Linux. x86_64 or Arm.
For developers, the idea is that onboarding to an existing project looks like this:
$ git clone
$ flox activate
I truly believe it's the current local maximum for developer environments, bringing Nix-powered reproducibility together with an intuitive and familiar CLI.
I can't help myself, so I've developed several tools and projects related to Flox:
- flox-debugger - A "debugger" for the
flox activate command
- zmitchell/flox-debugger
- The
flox activate command does the complex, heavy lifting of setting up a shell with a reproducible set of dependencies, carefully handled process parentage, etc. It's the magic that makes Flox work, and it's simultaneously the hardest part to get correct.
- release-flox (internal) - The (internal) tool we use to cut and upload Flox CLI releases
- flox-ci (private) - A proof of concept CI system based around Flox environments
- This uses
systemd-nspawn containers and ZFS copy-on-write clones to make starting jobs substantially faster when there are jobs on a given host that use the same Flox environment.
Writing
I write infrequently, but I enjoy doing it when I have something to teach. Much of the documentation at flox.dev/docs was written by me (especially the Concepts section).
A few highlights:
Talks
I'm genetically incapable of shutting up, and being on stage temporarily quenches my thirst for power, so I frequently find myself speaking at conferences or working booths.
The full list of my appearences is here: https://tinkering.xyz/talks/
The highlights:
- NixCon 2025 — “You can't spell ‘devshell’ without ‘hell’”
- https://media.ccc.de/v/nixcon2025-56410-you-cant-spell-devshell
- RustConf 2023 — “Async Building Blocks: A Streaming Data Drama in Three Acts”
- https://youtu.be/hU-lKbAdOUg
[^1]: In the sense that I somehow convinced my employer to sponsor my curling team. I'm not kidding: https://flox.dev/blog/flox-named-exclusive-media-sponsor-of-the-rock-bottom-curling-clubs-2025-season/
[^2]: Look, someone had to do it. Also, no one else volunteered to be an accomplice in my Python crime.