4:00 pm ET
“Nebi: Environment management for teams”
with Dharhas PothinaReproducibility of your software environments is often treated like an afterthought. By the time you’re thinking about it, it’s already too late.
We encountered this time again with clients and built a solution in the form of a conda-store which introduced versioning, role-based-accessed control, and most importantly: reproducibility, to conda environments on platforms like JupyterHub.
While effective, the project required heavy infrastructure, had slow environment solves, and was tied to a server-first world of global conda environments. Meanwhile, tools like Pixi and uv have transformed Python packaging with lockfiles and project-oriented workflows, improving reproducibility, but only for individual developers.
In this presentation, we introduce Nebi, a new open-source tool that brings multi-user environment management to the modern Python packaging era, supporting both project-oriented and shared global environments with versioning, role-based access control, and sharing via publishing through OCI registries as well as standalone servers.
Meet Dharhas Pothina
Dharhas Pothina is the CTO at OpenTeams where he helps organizations own their AI future using open source solutions. He also leads the development teams for the Nebari, Conda-Store and Ragna open source projects and is on the steering committee for the HoloViz suite of data visualization tools.
His background includes expertise in AI, computational modeling, big data/high performance computing, visualization and geospatial analysis. Prior to his current position he was the CTO at Quansight, a technology firm focussed on sustaining and building the open source PyData and Scientific Python ecosystem. Hi background includes 15 years in state and federal research labs where he led large multi-disciplinary, multi-agency research programs.
He holds a PhD in Civil Engineering and an MS in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and a BTech in Aerospace Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras.
Dharhas is passionate about enabling scientists and engineers with tools that let them scale as well as share their analyses, he loves woodworking, photography and teaching his daughters to love science.
Recent Events
#49 Bridging the conda and PyPI Ecosystems
Dan Yeaw — July 29, 2026
If you've ever wondered why pip install numpy and conda install numpy
aren't the same thing, you've bumped into one of Python packaging's oldest
fault lines. Conda and PyPI evolved to solve different problems: one for
compiled scientific libraries, one for pure-Python packages. The gap between
them has caused headaches ever since. In this talk, we'll explore why the
split happened, what's fundamentally different under the hood, and how the
two ecosystems are finally starting to come together.
#48 Great Docs: Building the Documentation Site Generator I Always Wanted
Rich Iannone — June 24, 2026
Documentation generators have for me been a thing where there are so many trade-offs. They might make beautiful sites but be shallow feature-wise. Or full of features but really hard to configure. After some years of working across R, Python, and the broader open-source ecosystem, I started Great Docs with a simple end goal: your docs should look really great, be easy to discover, and be ready for the AI era.
In this presentation I will walk through the various places I drew inspiration for Great Docs (pkgdown, MATLAB, Elixir, and the Vue.js docs). I'll show how Great Docs makes documentation consumable by both humans and AI agents through Skills and MCP server documentation. I'll share some of the features I obsessively built because I wanted them in my own package docs. Finally, I'll discuss where this project is headed beyond Python (toward documenting CLIs, TUIs, and more).
Watch on Youtube#47 Pixi: Package management that doesn't stop at Python packages.
Ruben Arts — May 27, 2026
Pixi is a cross-platfrom cross-language package manager that is build on top of the conda-ecosystem and integrates well with PyPI. It provides a workflow similar to other modern packages managers like uv, yarn, cargo but for every language on every OS. In this presentation you'll learn the basic usage of Pixi and where it really shines. More info can be found on https://pixi.sh
If you’re interested in learning more about packaging, Ruben has recommended watching:
Watch on YoutubeAbout Us
At Don’t Use This Code, we want to create a unique opportunity to see Python succeed and thrive within the National Labs! We propose creating a new resource for scientists, researchers, and technical staff to support their use of Python and to build a strong, lasting community for Python users within the Department of Energy National Labs. Disclaimer: The Python Exchange is an independent group of Python enthusiasts who wish to see the use of Python and open-source computing thrive within the National Lab system. This group is not sponsored by or affiliated with the Department of Energy.