2026-07-17 –, Johnson Great Room
Until very recently, producing and using reproducible scientific software environments required advanced knowledge and a strict adherence to best practices (e.g. DOI: 10.25080/majora-212e5952-028). Now, with the advent of modern tooling with lockfile-first workflows (i.e. Pixi and uv), and the emergence of lockfile standards across scientific open source, applications can be made reproducible at the digest level through tooling decisions. As this technology and practices become increasingly common there is an opportunity to define common best practices around lockfile based software development that can further reduce developer overhead and maintenance burden. This Birds of a Feather panel will focus on how experienced developers are leveraging lockfiles across software development, applications, and deployment while providing best practices and practical recommendations, while also highlighting continuing challenges and opportunities for improvement.
Naty Clementi is a senior software engineer at NVIDIA. She is a former academic with a Masters in Physics and PhD in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering to her name. Her work involves contributing to RAPIDS, and in the past she has also contributed and maintained other open source projects such as Ibis and Dask. She is an active member of PyLadies and an active volunteer and organizer of Women and Gender Expansive Coders DC meetups.
Matthew is a research scientist in experimental high energy physics and data science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Data Science Institute (a “data physicist”). He works as a member of the ATLAS collaboration on searches for physics beyond the standard model with experiments performed at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland. He also serves on the executive board of the Institute for Research and Innovation in Software for High Energy Physics (IRIS-HEP) where he is a researcher and the Analysis Systems Area lead. He is also a topical editor for physics and data science for the Journal of Open Source Software. He previously did his Ph.D. (2019) research at Southern Methodist University, also on the ATLAS experiment, and was a postdoc at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Ruben is part of the Prefix.dev core team, builing Pixi and other tools in the package management space. Originally he's a Robotics engineer working on industrial robots, but quickly figuring out that solving development and deployment problems were one of the bigger issues that robotics developers had to deal with. Joining Prefix.dev allowed him to focus on improving the UX/DX of a large group of software engineers. Over the years he's been doing multiple talks and workshops on how to properly manage software and development workflows.
