branch master updated: website: Add draft birthday blog post.

[Ludovic Courtès]

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commit a4f0bfd7e850095ec417334c53289e6d8bd503b4
Author: zimoun <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com>
AuthorDate: Fri Apr 15 16:18:10 2022 +0200

    website: Add draft birthday blog post.
    
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+title: 10 years of stories behind Guix
+author: Guix Hackers
+tags: Community
+date: 2022-04-18 23:21:11
+---
+
+Happy birthday of the [initial
+commit](https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/commit/?id=207cba8114d354737b231e510d6110ea2a42e07b)!
+On April, 18th 2012, the first file had been added and the journey started.
+Thirteen minutes later, [another
+commit](https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/commit/?id=77d3cf087dca7b92af745b7e25af186d1d11f7b9)
+representing one pillar of the project: what is the best solution.  Quoting
+the initial header file: Guix was «Nix package management from Guile».  The
+175 blog posts cover the evolution.  Today, 10 years later from this initial
+commit, Guix means 94k+ commits by more than 600 contributors.  Guix is made
+by people, let thanks them.
+
+Here a collection of stories by contributors.
+
+# Alice Brenon
+
+As a conclusion, Guix is a really neat system and I hope you enjoy it as much
+as I do !
+
+My story with Guix is a bit topsy-turvy so I thought I might as well start by
+the end : ) I first ranked it last among systems I wanted to test, then was a
+bit puzzled by it when I had the chance to test it after all the others had
+disappointed me, and we finally got to know each other once I installed it on
+my work laptop, because when you need a good, stable system you know you can
+rely on, why not use the most surprising one ? Strangely, the alchemy worked
+and it has never let me down so far.
+
+Like all good computer things, it looked way scarier from a distance than it
+really was, and seemed to be very much about ethics and theory while it's
+actually very pragmatic.  I had struggled for years with the myriad of
+incompatible package formats for systems, then for each specific languages,
+and was flushed to discover at last what seemed to be a reasonable universal
+format.  That's probably what I like best about it: the ability to use
+potentially any software I want without trashing my system. The welcoming
+community eager to help and valueing my contributions made it even better, and
+submitting patches came naturally.  I mostly use it for development, and to
+keep my sanity in spite of all the data science tools I have to use for
+work.  I sometimes wish it were easier to tweak the core of the system, but I
+blame my lack of free time at least as much as its design.  I would absolutely
+love to see my Guix system using the runit init system one day but it just
+works and I finally learnt that it was all that mattered if you wanted to get
+things done in the end.
+
+# Andreas Enge
+
+When I think of Guix, I always kid myself into believing that I had the idea -
+I remember chatting with Ludovic around a GNU hackers' meeting about Nix; I
+joked that since Guile is the GNU language, Nix should be rewritten in Guile.
+But it turned out that Ludovic had already started such a project in
+earnest... Luckily there is the git history to refresh our memories.
+Apparently I installed Guix, at the time only the package manager, with
+Ludovic's help in December 2012, and immediately reported a few bugs.  My next
+action was to update the package for my own software.  Learning Scheme was
+quite difficult, but I fondly remember discussing quotes and quasiquotes with
+Ludovic. After that, I mostly added packages to Guix, which was possible
+without knowing much of functional programming; the most tricky packages that
+stayed in my mind were ImageMagick and TeX Live.  I came to appreciate the GNU
+Autotools - with all their shortcomings, having a uniform (and usually
+reliable) way of compiling and installing a software makes creating a Guix
+package almost trivial.
+
+The most compelling feature of Guix was (and still is, I think) the ability to
+roll back package installations, and now complete system installations - no
+more fear of updating a package to a non-working state!  And on a completely
+different level, the nice and welcoming atmosphere in the community, in no
+small part thanks to Ludovic's initial efforts of creating an inclusive
+environment.
+
+Many formidable adventures are attached to working on Guix.  Buying our first
+server for the build farm was difficult, since we wanted to use a machine with
+Libreboot that would work well with the GNU system.  Eventually we succeeded,
+and it is still hosted with the non-profit Aquilenet in Bordeaux, so we
+managed to start our own infrastructure in accordance with our values.
+
+Writing the bylaws of the Guix Europe non-profit was another exciting
+adventure; again we tried to create a structure in line with our values, where
+the decisions were taken as collectively as possible.
+
+And personally I have fond memories of taking part in Guix meetings at FOSDEM
+and co-organising the Guix Days in Brussels; these are such nice occasions to
+meet people passionate about Guix and free software!  I will never forget the
+Guix Days 2020 when I had just returned from a Reproducible Build Summit where
+I admired their way of facilitating the workshop, which I then tried to copy
+for our own meeting.
+
+The Guix system meets all my daily needs now, so I have no technical wishes
+for the future - but I trust in the many creative minds working on advancing
+the project to come up with nice new ideas.  And I wish the human adventure
+and community building around Guix to continue!
+
+
+# Andrew Tropin
+
+It's all lisp, no distraction, pure consistency!)  Every few years I migrate
+to a different workhorse and it always been a pain to bring my software setup
+with me: forgot a pam/udev rule here, package here and some tiny hack here and
+everything is messed up, easier to reinstall everything from ground up.  With
+declarative and reproducible nature of Guix System, Guix Home and rde project
+it's just a pure pleasure: write the configuration once, use it everywhere!
+Daemon configurations, package build phases, cron tasks, everything described
+in Guile Scheme.  The one language to rule them all!  I look forward for a
+little more: wider adoption of Guix for managing development environments and
+infrastructures.
+
+GNU Guix respects you and your freedoms: anyone can explore and study, tweak
+and adjust, and share everything they want, every program available.  Moreover
+every package is bootstraped, what a miracle!  Yes, some hardware isn't
+supported, but for a good reason, for this price you get a lot.  I look
+forward for a little more: [decentralized
+substitutes](https://issues.guix.gnu.org/52555) and RISC-V laptops running GNU
+Guix.
+
+Thank you the community for all the hard work, already enjoy Guix for more
+than an year and look forward for more exciting things to appear!
+
+
+# Arun Isaac
+
+I was introduced to Guix in 2016.  That was around the time I was learning
+lisp and having my mind blown.  As soon as I heard that Guix was written in a
+lisp and that it was a FSDG compliant distro, I knew that this was going to be
+the best distro ever and immediately jumped ship.
+
+While I was immediately smitten by the perfection and elegance of Guix, I have
+stayed this long not for the technical excellence but for the people.  The
+Guix community is the warmest and most caring free software community I have
+ever been a part of.  I honestly did not believe such people could exist
+online until I saw Guix.  In the future, I would love for this community to
+grow and thrive with a smoother issue tracking and contribution process so
+that potential contributors, especially newcomers, don't turn away frustrated.
+
+# Björn Höfling
+
+In 2016, I searched a GNU/Linux distribution for a friend's laptop and chose
+GuixSD (now Guix System), inspired by a LibrePlanet video from MediaGoblin.
+The laptop failed to digest this OS, as it demanded binary, non-free drivers.
+In contrast, my wetware is 100% [GNU
+FSDG-compatible](https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-system-distribution-guidelines.en.html),
+and so, generation 1 of Guix burned successfully into my brain, without any
+headaches.  Or at least, they went away with the help from the very friendly,
+supportive, tolerant (only to the tolerant, thanks to the code of conduct)
+community.
+
+My contributions started with not understanding Guix, and asking stupid
+questions on the mailing lists.  Sometimes during that process I found bugs
+and analyzed them further, which helped Ludovic and other developers to fix
+them.  I reviewed mostly Java packages and added some on my own.  I very much
+enjoyed co-mentoring for [Outreachy](https://www.outreachy.org/), and learned
+more on automated video/screencast generation.  I should be really more active
+in the community again!
+
+For the future of Guix, I would like to see more Java and Go packages (hem,
+this comes not from alone, I should review and contribute more).  Internally I
+wish a more intuitive bug- and patch-tracker instead of Debbugs+Mumi.
+Externally I wish a much bigger awareness in the commercial "Open Source"
+world about software freedom, bootstrapping your environment and dependencies
+from free source code in a real reproducible way, instead of relying on
+opaque, binary containers.  I wish people would much more take care of their
+dependencies (with Guix, of cause!), put much more thoughts in their usage of
+dependencies, break-up dependency hell and support third parties in building
+their sources with free software (instead of relying on binary dependencies
+and opaque containerized dev-environments).
+
+# Blake Shaw
+
+New media artists and designers suffer from following dilemma: our work, with
+its primary medium being code, is at once perhaps the simplest medium to
+/distribute/ -- requiring little more than copying a directory of text files
+from one hard drive to another -- yet the works themselves remain a total
+nightmare to faithfully /reproduce/ across varying machines at different
+points in time. Among other reasons, this is because our works are often
+composed of disparate parts with accompanying technical debt: an audio-visual
+installation may use the C++ library /openFrameworks/ for high-performance
+interactive graphics, Haskell's /TidalCycles/ for realtime sequencing, the
+fantastic /FAUST/ signal processing language for zero-delay audio DSP, plus
+the usual dependencies; openCV, libfreenect, cairo, gstreamer, ffmpeg and so
+on.  Time and its corresponding ABI changes intensify our predicament; not
+only is it often an error-prone and laborious task to get all of this running
+correctly across many machines, the nature of technical debt means that
+getting an installation from 2014 up and running in 2022 is often more trouble
+than its worth. Sadly, these seemingly immaterial works of art that are the
+simplest to copy are simultaneously some of the most difficult to reproduce
+and the quickest to depreciate.
+
+Guix, on the other hand, offers its users provenance-preserving
+/bit-reproducible builds/ of their entire operating systems: using Guix's
+implementation of the functional software deployment model, I should be able
+to reproduce, bit-for-bit, the exact same results across equivalent
+hardware. Suddenly our artworks can be deterministically produced not only at
+the level of the source code's changelog but also as the level of the build,
+offering the guarantee that our usually glued-together towers of systems that
+power our installations can be revisited and reproduced in the future, and the
+deployment processes becomes as simple as packing your system into a container
+to be deployed to a remote target. These guarantees means that the scaling of
+our works become simplified: if you want to do an installation that involves
+100 Raspberry Pis communicating with one another in a dynamic system, you can
+focus on working on just a small paramaterized subset, and then generate their
+varying configurations using the infrastructure that guix provides, . I'm
+currently in the early phases of developing re::producer, a "creative
+plumber's toolkit" that seeks to simplify this process for artists, tailoring
+the tools provided by Guix to the domain-specific needs of media art and
+allowing artists to declaratively define complex media art systems using one
+of the greatest programming language of all time, Scheme.
+
+This is still new terrain, so there is plenty of work to do. But thats no
+excuse to keep up with your old habits, so roll up your sleeves and come hack
+the good hack!
+
+
+# Cyril Roelandt
+
+Back in early 2013, I was lucky enough to be unemployed for a few months.
+This gave me a lot of time to try out GNU Guix.  Ludovic had told me about it
+a few months earlier, while we were still working at the same place.  It was
+so easy to add new packages that I naturally ended up submitting a few patches
+and quickly trolled the whole project by adding my editor of choice, vim.
+Debugging package definitions was also very simple since the builds were
+reproducible by default.
+
+I also had some fun writing the first version of the linter and improving the
+importer/updater for Python packages.  I even hacked tox to make it use Guix
+instead of virtualenv and gave a talk about this at
+[FOSDEM](https://archive.fosdem.org/2016/schedule/event/guix_tox/).  Even
+though I left the project a few years ago, I'm glad to see it's doing well and
+is used in science and has joined forces with Software Heritage.
+
+# Ekaitz Zarraga
+
+A friend of mine introduced me to Nix and Guix a while ago but I was hesitant
+to try it because I hate configuring stuff and this didn't look as an easy
+distribution to use.  Once I discovered we could have separate environments
+and how easy is to write a package (despite all other difficulties Guix has) I
+was completely into it.  I installed Guix in my laptop and never looked
+back. In the 10 years I've been using a GNU/Linux distribution I never
+interacted that directly with my packages: creating custom ones, sending them
+upstream, making fixes…  That's also freedom!  Now, a couple of years later, I
+am working on improving the bootstrap process for RISC-V and using Guix as a
+mechanism that provides reproducible builds and an easy way to manage all the
+actors I have to deal with: very old software with old dependencies, colliding
+libraries, environment variables, custom patches in source code…  This would
+be a pain to build in any other environment, but Guix makes hard things easy.
+Guix also makes easy things hard sometimes, but we are working on that!
+
+# Eric Bavier
+
+As a young(ish) computer programmer, I had been running Gnu/Linux systems for
+about 7 years but wanted to find a project I could contribute back to.
+Fortunately, I came upon a release announcement for Guix after having poked
+around the GNU Hurd and Guile spheres.  To me at the time Guix had the exact
+mix of upstart energy, optimism, and long-term vision that I was hoping to
+find. Over the years I've been able to contribute packages I use in both my
+personal and work lives, and I'm proud to have implemented the first version
+of `guix refresh --list-dependents`. I've really loved how Guix allows me to
+easily move my environments around to different systems, and "rollback" gives
+me much peace of mind knowing that I can tinker with the system and recover
+should something go wrong. But probably my favorite part of Guix is the
+fantastic community I've seen grow around the project.  It exemplifies the
+sort of caring, kind, supportive group I wish many other projects had.
+Together I know we'll be able to make advances on many fronts. In particular,
+I'd like to see further work on peer-to-peer substitutes delivery, a native
+build daemon, additional tools for managing relocatable pack collections, and
+continued leadership in bootstrapping.
+
+
+# Florian Pelz (pelzflorian)
+
+GNU Guix to me is a group that cares about its software and about the people
+involved.  I’ve got to know Guix by reading discussions on how to do
+sandboxing properly.  But actually, Guix convinced me with its clarity and
+approachability and principles.  Guix opened my eyes on how parts of GNU fit
+together.  Thanks to all who give us this freedom to understand and decide.
+By contributing to the translation, I hope to make it reach more users and
+developers.
+
+# Guillaume Le Vaillant
+
+Before I started using Guix in 2019, I was using Gentoo because I liked how I
+could easily package software and make package variants with some custom
+patches.  However one day an upgrade didn't go well and many packages ended in
+a bad state.  I realized I would have to reinstall the whole system to get
+things to work again. Before recompiling the whole system, I tried Nix and
+Guix, because I had read somewhere that they used functional package
+management, which gives the possibility to roll back to a working state when
+an upgrade causes problems.  I chose Guix because I thought it was going in
+the right direction by using only free software and trying to get reproducible
+builds. The fact that package definitions use the Scheme language was a bonus
+point as I like Lisp languages.  And there was even a build system for Common
+Lisp packages, which is rarely the case in the GNU/Linux distributions I tried
+over time. So I started using Guix, and packaging softwares I wanted that were
+not in Guix yet. One day someone asked me if I would be interested in having
+commit access, and I accepted.  I also found a way to improve the build system
+for Common Lisp packages that simplified package definitions.  In the future,
+I think it would be nice to add an importer fetching information from
+Quicklisp, as it would make packaging Common Lisp software even easier.
+
+# Jan (janneke) Nieuwenhuizen
+
+At FOSDEM 2016 there were seven talks about GNU Guix: A talk about the Hurd by
+Manolis Ragkousis, about functional package management by Ricardo Wurmus and
+that was just what I needed to hear: Finally a viable promise for the GNU
+System and much more innovative than I could have hoped for.  At the time I
+also worked on a project where building binary releases was becoming more
+unmanageable with every release because of conflicting requirements.  We were
+slowly migrating away from C++ to GNU Guile, so while not directly applicable
+the talk "Your distro is a Scheme library" by Ludovic Courtès also made me
+feel: Go Guix!
+
+ Using Guix, my intricate dependency problems building binary packages
+ quickly and easily disappeared.  That gave me the confidence that I
+ needed and I wanted to get involved.  My first contributions where a
+ programming game called Laby and its dependencies and a few more
+ packages that I missed.  After running Guix on top of Debian GNU/Linux
+ for three months I switched to what we now call Guix System.  Guix did
+ not have log rotation yet in those days, so I created a package.
+
+This is how I found how amazingly helpful and friendly the community was.  I
+created the MinGW cross build for Guile 2.0 and then "found out" about the
+bootstrap binaries: The only packages in Guix that are not built from source.
+Something just did not feel right.  The manual said: "These big chunks of
+binary code are practically non-auditable which breaks the source to binary
+transparency that we get in the rest of the package dependency graph."  So, I
+wrote GNU Mes and started working on solving this problem.  Twice we halved
+the size of the bootstrap binaries and the work is still ongoing.
+
+What possibly started somewhat as a April fools joke in 2020 about the
+Hurd---this is still unclear---was (mis?)taken by some as a real project and
+led to a fun hacking frenzy of several months finally producing the
+"Childhurd": A Guix Shepherd service that gives access to the GNU/Hurd in a
+VM.  My wish for the near future would be see an up-to-date Hurd including the
+Debian rumpkernel patches that may finally enable running the Hurd on real
+hardware again.
+
+# John Kehayias
+
+All I wanted to do was to try out a new status bar, but the author only
+officially supported Nix for building.  That started me to finally look at Nix
+after hearing about it in passing before. I was intrigued by the focus on
+reproducible and declarative builds. The language, not so much. My brother
+mentioned another project in the same vein but built on a Lisp. As a lover of
+all things Lisp, that was basically enough for me to dive right in.  Beyond
+the banner features of the powerful package and system management,
+reproducible builds, system configuration, and, of course, Guile, I quickly
+found perhaps the biggest and most important: the GNU Guix community. They
+have been nothing short of amazing: helpful, intelligent, supportive, and fun
+to hang out with on the #guix channel. In less than a year, my journey so far
+has taken me through the (is it infamous yet?)  recent big core-updates branch
+and merge, submitting patches for random libraries and key desktop features I
+use, and participating in the motivating Guix Days 2022. Looking to the
+future, I hope we can better harness the energy and resources of the growing
+Guix community. It is already a great project to get involved with and make
+your own, but with better and quicker patch review, further building out and
+using our development tools and ecosystem, and continuing to smooth out the
+rough edges for new users/contributors, I'm sure the next 10 years of GNU Guix
+will be very bright indeed.
+
+
+# Konrad Hinsen
+
+In my work as a computational scientist, my first encounter with
+reproducibility issues happened in 1995, when a quantum chemistry package
+produced different results on two almost identical Silicon Graphics
+workstations.  This was the beginning of a long quest for better computational
+reproducibility, in the course of which I discovered in 2014 Nix and Guix as
+two implementations of the same promising idea: the fully automated
+construction of a complete reproducible software stack.  Of the two, Guix was
+more aligned with my lispy past, and already had a burgeoning computational
+science user community.  I started playing with Guix in 2016, in a virtual
+machine under macOS, but only fully adopted Guix for my everyday work in 2021,
+when I left macOS for Linux.  During those five years, I also learned to
+appreciate the Guix community, which is friendly, competent, and refreshingly
+low-ceremony in spite of continuous growth.  That makes for an easy transition
+from newbie to contributor (mostly contributing packages, but also the
+time-machine command that matters for reproducibility).  The anniversary is a
+good occasion to express my thanks to all those who answered my many
+questions, ranging from conceptual to technical, and to the maintainer team
+that does an important but not very visible work by critically examining all
+submitted packages and code enhancements.  My main wish for the future is a
+lower barrier to adoption for my colleagues in computational science, and I
+hope to contribute to making this happen.
+
+# Ludovic Courtès
+
+It all started as a geeky itch-scratching experiment: a [tiny bit of Guile
+code](https://archive.softwareheritage.org/browse/revision/207cba8114d354737b231e510d6110ea2a42e07b/?path=guix.scm)
+to make remote procedure calls (RPCs) to the [Nix](https://nixos.org/nix)
+build daemon.  Why?  As I was involved in and excited about
+[Guile](https://gnu.org/software/guile) and Nix, it felt natural to try and
+bridge them.  Guile had just had [its 2.0.0
+release](https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/news/gnu-guile-200-released.html),
+which broadened its scope, and I wanted to take advantage of it.  Whether to
+go beyond the mere experiment is a decision I made sometime after a
+presentation at the [2012 GNU Hackers
+Meeting](https://www.gnu.org/ghm/2012/ddorf/).
+
+It was far from obvious that this would lead us anywhere—did the world
+_really_ need another package manager?  The decisive turn of event, for me,
+was to see that, at the time Guix [officially became part of GNU in November
+2012](https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnu-system-discuss/2012-11/msg00000.html),
+it had already become a group effort; there was, it seems, a shared vision of
+why such a crazy-looking project made sense not just technically but also
+socially—for GNU, for user freedom.  I remember Nikita Karetnikov as the first
+heroic contributor at a time when Guix could barely install packages.
+
+One of my “ah ha!” moments was when I built the first bootable image a [a year
+later](https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-user/2013-02/msg00131.html).
+[G-expressions](https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01580582/en), the [service
+framework](https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/html_node/Service-Composition.html),
+and [checkout
+authentication](https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2020/securing-updates/) are among
+my favorite hacks.  What’s mind-blowing to me though is what others have
+achieved over the years: [the incredible bootstrapping
+work](https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/tags/bootstrapping/),
+[Disarchive](https://ngyro.com/software/disarchive.html),
+[Emacs-Guix](https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix/emacs-guix.git/), the
+[installer](https://guix.gnu.org/en/videos/2020/system-graphical-installer/),
+[Hurd support](https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/tags/gnuhurd/),
+[Guix Home](https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2022/keeping-ones-home-tidy/),
+supporting tools like [Cuirass](https://guix.gnu.org/en/cuirass/), the [Data
+Service](https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2020/introduction-to-the-guix-data-service-the-missing-blog-post/),
+and [mumi](https://issues.guix.gnu.org).  There’s also the less visible but
+crucial work: Outreachy and GSoC mentoring, support on IRC and the mailing
+lists, build farm administration, translation, dealing with the occasional
+incident on communication channels, organizing events such as the Guix Days or
+FOSDEM, and more.
+
+As much as I love _hacking the good hack_, I think Guix’s main asset is its
+community: a friendly, productive, and creative group with a sense of
+attention to the other.  I started clueless about what it means “to build a
+community” and learned a lot from everyone met on the way.  We did it, _we
+built this_!  Thumbs up, Guix!
+
+# Luis Felipe
+
+When I found that Guix existed, I saw it could make it easier for GNU to
+release its Operating System and reach a wider audience.  I intended to
+propose some graphic designs related to this, and sent a
+[message](https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnu-system-discuss/2014-11/msg00002.html)
+to GNU in order to test the waters.  Things didn't go as I expected, so,
+instead, I decided to direct my contributions towards GNU Guix and its
+distribution of GNU.
+
+Since then, I've contributed with graphics (Guix and Guile logos and website
+designs, desktop backgrounds, release and promotional artwork), testing, bug
+reporting, packaging, and Spanish translations.
+
+It's been about 8 years of Guix for me (the heck!).  I started using the
+package manager on Debian, gradually switched the provenance of my software
+from Debian to Guix, and, once GNOME became available, I moved to Guix’s
+distribution of the GNU operating system, which I've been using as my main
+system for about 3 years now (and I don't see that changing anytime soon).
+
+Right now, I'm enjoying developing software using Guix's reproducible
+environments and containers, and using one single package manager for every
+dependency.
+
+I hope this system reaches a wider audience and brings science to home
+computing along the way.  Homes should be capable of producing scientific work
+too.
+
+# Manolis Ragkousis
+
+When I think how I started with Guix, I use one word to describe it, luck!  It
+was early 2014 when I encountered Guix by luck, while I was still a student at
+Crete, Greece.  I remember there was a strike during that time and I had
+plenty of free time for a week, so I decided that I will try start working on
+this.  Then a idea came in mind, why not try porting Guix to GNU/Hurd and
+build a system with it?  One thing led to another and it also became a GSoC
+project in 2015 and 2016.  In 2016 I also gave a Fosdem talk about this, which
+somehow ended up being the start of me helping out with the GNU Guile devroom
+in 2017 and 2018, and then what became the Minimalistic Languages until today.
+When I am thinking about Guix is like thinking about the story of me growing
+up and the people I met through all these year I consider family! Guix is a
+big part of my life, I use it everywhere and even though I am not able to help
+much nowadays I am following the project as much as I can.  Here's hoping to
+another 10 year!
+
+# Mathieu Othacehe
+
+I was introduced to GNU Guix by a colleague, Clément Lassieur in 2016. At
+first I found the concept overwhelming. Writing Guile wrappers for each and
+every Linux service out there and keeping them up to date seemed like
+impossible.  However, I quickly fell in love with the package manager, the
+distribution and the community behind. A few months later, GNU Guix was
+running on all my machines and I started hacking on the continuous integration
+tool: Cuirass.
+
+Since then GNU Guix has been an important part of my life. I wrote most of the
+Guix System installer while traveling by bike to China in 2018. During the
+2020 lockdown, I worked with janneke on the new image API and the Hurd
+port. At that time, I was proposed a co-maintainer position of the project.
+In 2021, thanks to an NGI sponsorship, I dedicated 6 months to improving our
+continuous integration process and overall substitutes coverage.
+
+Recently it has been harder to dedicate as much efforts on the project but I'm
+sure this is a transient phase. I can't wait to start working again with the
+incredibly talented people making this piece of software so special to me.
+
+
+# Paul Garlick
+
+I began using and contributing to the Guix project in 2016.  I had been
+searching for a way to preserve software environments that are used for
+numerical simulation.  The applications that run in these environments often
+comprise a combination of specialised code and building blocks drawn from an
+underlying framework.  There are many moving parts and changes to a low-level
+library can block the operation of the high- level application.  How much
+better things would be if one could specify the exact components of the
+environment and re-create it whenever it is needed.  I discovered that Guix
+provides the machinery to do just that.  Scheme was new to me then so I had
+some learning to do before contributing.  This included a detour via
+Vonnegut/Cat's Cradle, of course, to discover the meaning of ice-9.  Suitably
+informed I returned to add a number of finite volume and finite element
+frameworks to the Guix package collection.  Keeping these packages up- to-date
+and welcoming new simulation-related packages is the next target.  Looking
+ahead to the next ten years, an important task is to popularise the use of the
+Guix tools.  Many more engineers and scientists stand to benefit from the use
+of the dependable software environments that are now made possible.
+
+
+# Ricardo Wurmus
+
+In 2014 I became responsible for building and installing scientific software
+at the Max Delbrück Centre, a research institute in Berlin.  We used CentOS,
+so I built custom RPMs, installing applications to ad-hoc prefix directories.
+After a few weeks I took a minute to consider the horrific implications of
+maintaining a growing collection of custom software with RPM.  As I tried to
+remember what life choices had led me to this moment, I recalled an
+[announcement
+email](https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-guix/2013-01/msg00191.html) of a
+quirky GNU package manager written in Scheme.  A short web search later I was
+playing around with Guix.
+
+After an encouraging chat on IRC I realized that I could probably replace our
+custom RPM repository and build different variants of scientific software on
+much more solid ground---all the while contributing to a project that felt
+like a new and exciting take on GNU.  We're building the GNU system!
+
+Guix only had very few of the packages I needed, so I got busy.  I packaged
+and bootstrapped the JDK because I was under the mistaken assumption that I
+would need it for [R](https://www.r-project.org/) (turns out Java is
+optional).  Many more foolish adventures followed, and some of them have
+actually been useful for others.
+
+I had found my tribe of fellow hackers who cared about the vision of the GNU
+system, encouraged playful experimentation, and were rooting for each other to
+succeed in building a better system that made software freedom a practical
+reality, blurring the lines between developers and users.  In the decades to
+come I hope many more people will get to experience what I did and end up
+calling this community their home.
+
+
+# Thiago Jung Bauermann
+
+I learned about Guix when I was looking for alternative, safe ways of
+installing an up-to-date Rust toolchain on my machine (at the time rustup
+didn't verify signatures of downloaded binaries, and it still doesn't do the
+full job).  Guix is a great way to have the latest and greatest software on
+top of your slower-moving Linux distribution.  I love how easy it makes to
+create instant, ad hoc environments with the packages you need for a specific
+task.  Or to temporarily try out some new app or tool, leaving Guix to
+garbage-collect it and its dependencies.  The Guix community is amazing as
+well! It's a pleasure to participate on the mailing lists.  And I've been
+enjoying learning Scheme!  For the future, I hope Guix can get even better
+test coverage so that every update of the master branch is guaranteed to not
+introduce regressions. And that the project gets more committers, to help with
+the constant influx of patches.
+
+# raingloom
+
+There are multiple reasons I started using Guix.  On the tech side, I'd been
+playing around with 9front for a while at that time, but kept running into
+issues where the imperative structure of namespaces was getting in my way. I
+like Haskell a lot and heard about the many benefits of a pure functional
+approach to build systems, et cetera. I ran Guix on top of Arch for a while
+and liked it a lot. Using package transformations still feels magical. But
+yall already know about this cool stuff from Ambrevar's blog post.  On the
+social side, I saw that one of my favorite compsci people - Christine Lemmer
+Webber - was involved with the project, so I knew it probably has a nice
+community, which turned out to be very true. This is one of the best
+communities centered around a piece of tech that I've been in and yall inspire
+me to be better with each interaction. Huge thank you for that.  My favorite
+Guix memory is when someone CC'd me in a patch for the egg importer, which was
+built on top of the Chicken Scheme build system I contributed. Seeing others
+build on top of my work is an amazing feeling.  For the future, I hope the
+service management improvements will keep coming, but what I'd like to see the
+most is Guix running on old and slow devices. There is a lot of work to be
+done to make it more bandwidth and space efficient and to support development
+on systems with little RAM. If I could use it instead of PostmarketOS/Alpine,
+I'd be elated. On the human side, I hope we can keep contributors from
+burnout, while increasing the software's quality. I think the way Blender
+development is structured could be a source of inspiration. On that note,
+using Guix for reproducible art workflows would be rad.  Okay that's it, bye
+yall lovely people.
+
+# Vagrant Cascadian
+
+I think I first heard of Guix in 2016, triggering a late-night session trying
+to wrap my head around the crazy symlink farms at the heart of Guix.  By late
+2017 I was filing bug reports and eventually patches!
+
+I am deeply fascinated that Guix has Reproducible Builds built right in, with
+normalized, containerized build environments and the "guix challenge" tool to
+verify reproducibility.  I had heard of Nix as an interesting model, but
+valued the strong commitment to Free Software with Guix.
+
+Eventually I even grew crazy enough to package Guix in Debian... which
+indirectly lead to one of my most creative contributions to a Free Software
+project, a typo poem embedded in !
+
+I really appeciate the community around Guix and the process, values and
+thoughtfulness that work proactively to maintain a healthy community, even in
+the face of inevitable and occasional conflict.  Guix balances formal and
+informal in a way that works for me.
+
+I look forward to the day when Guix has a full source bootstrap!
+
+
+#### About GNU Guix
+
+[GNU Guix](https://guix.gnu.org) is a transactional package manager and
+an advanced distribution of the GNU system that [respects user
+freedom](https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-system-distribution-guidelines.html).
+Guix can be used on top of any system running the Hurd or the Linux
+kernel, or it can be used as a standalone operating system distribution
+for i686, x86_64, ARMv7, AArch64 and POWER9 machines.
+
+In addition to standard package management features, Guix supports
+transactional upgrades and roll-backs, unprivileged package management,
+per-user profiles, and garbage collection.  When used as a standalone
+GNU/Linux distribution, Guix offers a declarative, stateless approach to
+operating system configuration management.  Guix is highly customizable
+and hackable through [Guile](https://www.gnu.org/software/guile)
+programming interfaces and extensions to the
+[Scheme](http://schemers.org) language.