(define guixotic ...)

It seems we are a bit overdue to say hello! We're very excited to announce Guixotic, a consultancy cooperative specializing in GNU Guix and Guile. We offer a wide range of services, from commercial support and DevOps to training and feature development. You can read our first announcement to the world on the guix-devel mailing list.

So, what have we been up to in the past 4 months? We've been busy taking care of all the official stuff one needs to do to start a business, complicated a bit by us starting this cooperative internationally. We are currently three co-founders and members, spread out in the US and Japan. We've also worked with our first clients, contributed to Guix and related projects, and hacked away at other projects along the way. Here are some highlights:

• Client projects: Pharo (Smalltalk language) packaging, Icinga Web 2 monitoring services, one-on-one support
• Guix: contributed major updates to the Mesa graphics library and related packages, IceCat and Icedove, libxml2 (recent CVE), and Qt libraries and programs; fixed a hard-to-reproduce crash in guix shell and other minor bugs; and made many more smaller contributions
• Other hacking: learned and hacked on Haunt, a Guile-based static site generator powering this very website; started work on mmap support (kernel-backed memory mapping) in Guix/Guile

On the business side, we became e-residents of Estonia and registered Guixotic there with the help of Gate to Baltics. We have all the basics we need to run and expand our business, including being able to take donations with Liberapay and take various forms of payment almost anywhere in the world (via Wise, and Stripe). In future articles, we will explore why we chose to do this via e-residency in Estonia, to form as a cooperative, and the various bumps we've encountered.

Business paperwork aside, we've been thrilled to work with our first clients. They have reached out to us about adding and fixing packages in Guix, fixing bugs, developing a Guix environment for their work, and more. Between that, we've kept busy doing more of what we love, encouraged by the warm welcome we've received and even a few donations on Liberapay! This means continuing to hack on Guix and Guile and helping others do the same.

So, what's next for us? We're at a point now where the main goal is, in brief, to be busy! We need to find more clients, work more in the commercial business space, develop and offer training courses, and generally make this a self-sustaining business. We hope to bring in new members to our cooperative soon. People have reached out already, so we know there are people eager to do this work with us.

Look for more from us in this space soon, on what we've learned starting this business, the life of a cooperative, and especially articles on cool hacks and projects with Guix and Guile. Until then, happy hacking and keep those parentheses paired!