Guix at the Open Bioinformatics Codefest 2014 hackathon

Guix at the Open Bioinformatics Codefest 2014 hackathon

[David Thompson]

As some of you know, I gave a brief talk yesterday about Guix at the
hackathon mentioned in the subject line.  I had a few quick slides
(mostly copy/paste from the home page and docs) and a demonstration
(which of course had some technical difficulties).  Overall, I think it
went well for my first technical talk outside of college.  I received
several good questions from the audience, which showed me that people
were paying attention and are interested!  Afterwards, I had a few more
conversations about how Guix works at a local bar.

From what I gathered, the folks working in Bioinformatics are dealing
with big problems around reproducibility and determinism in their
computing environments, and I think project's like ours can really help
in this matter.

Here's to hoping we gain some more contributors. :)

-- 
David Thompson
Web Developer - Free Software Foundation - http://fsf.org
GPG Key: 0FF1D807
Support the FSF: https://fsf.org/donate

Re: Guix at the Open Bioinformatics Codefest 2014 hackathon

[Ludovic Courtès]

David Thompson <dthompson2@worcester.edu> skribis:

> As some of you know, I gave a brief talk yesterday about Guix at the
> hackathon mentioned in the subject line.  I had a few quick slides
> (mostly copy/paste from the home page and docs) and a demonstration
> (which of course had some technical difficulties).

Haha, demo effect.  :-)  What kind of difficulties was it?  Relating to
substitutes?  (hydra.gnu.org has been suffering from DoS over the last
couple of weeks...)

We can host the slides in guix-maintenance.git and/or on the web page if
you want.

> From what I gathered, the folks working in Bioinformatics are dealing
> with big problems around reproducibility and determinism in their
> computing environments, and I think project's like ours can really help
> in this matter.
>
> Here's to hoping we gain some more contributors. :)

Yup, thanks for giving a talk!

Ludo’.

Re: Guix at the Open Bioinformatics Codefest 2014 hackathon

[Thompson, David]

On Thu, Jul 10, 2014 at 8:11 AM, Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:
> Haha, demo effect.  :-)  What kind of difficulties was it?  Relating to
> substitutes?  (hydra.gnu.org has been suffering from DoS over the last
> couple of weeks...)

Yeah, the substitutes not working made my demo of installing emacs on
my Debian machine with Guix fail.  The other problem was my own,
because I forgot to authorize hydra.gnu.org in the VM image I was
showing off.  I guess it didn't matter in the end, because substitutes
weren't working at all.  I was at least able to show them an
operating-system definition, create a VM image from it, and boot it
with qemu.

> We can host the slides in guix-maintenance.git and/or on the web page if
> you want.

Yeah, they're really basic, but I can commit them to guix-maintenance
for good measure.  Do I have commit access to that repo since I'm in
the guix group on savannah?

> Yup, thanks for giving a talk!

It was a lot of fun!

- Dave

Re: Guix at the Open Bioinformatics Codefest 2014 hackathon

[Ludovic Courtès]

"Thompson, David" <dthompson2@worcester.edu> skribis:

> On Thu, Jul 10, 2014 at 8:11 AM, Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:
>> Haha, demo effect.  :-)  What kind of difficulties was it?  Relating to
>> substitutes?  (hydra.gnu.org has been suffering from DoS over the last
>> couple of weeks...)
>
> Yeah, the substitutes not working made my demo of installing emacs on
> my Debian machine with Guix fail.  The other problem was my own,
> because I forgot to authorize hydra.gnu.org in the VM image I was
> showing off.  I guess it didn't matter in the end, because substitutes
> weren't working at all.  I was at least able to show them an
> operating-system definition, create a VM image from it, and boot it
> with qemu.

OK.

>> We can host the slides in guix-maintenance.git and/or on the web page if
>> you want.
>
> Yeah, they're really basic, but I can commit them to guix-maintenance
> for good measure.  Do I have commit access to that repo since I'm in
> the guix group on savannah?

Yes, I think so.

Thanks!

Ludo’.