Nebi: Environment management for teams | The Python Exchange August 2026

About the Python Exchange for the Department of Energy: https://meetup.doepy.org/ Sign up here to be notified when the next Python Exchange is scheduled: https://bit.ly/py-exchange Guest Panelist: Dharhas Pothina Title: “Nebi: Environment management for teams” Bio: 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 focused on sustaining and building the open source PyData and Scientific Python ecosystem. His 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. Abstract: Reproducibility 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. At Don't Use This Code, we want to create a unique opportunity to see Python succeed and thrive within the DOE. In collaboration with an organizing committee of Python users and advocates from various DOE sites, we host regular conversations on the topic of Python in order to create a new resource for scientists, researchers, and technical staff. Our goal is to share best practices and build a strong, lasting community for Python users within the Department of Energy National Lab system. If you, or someone you know, might make a great panelist, we'd love to get in touch! Just send us an email at [email protected] if you would like to participate or have any questions.