At BuildBuddy, our mission is to bring the world's best developer tools to every company. In order to achieve this mission, we need to build a team that has experience leading and scaling the fastest growing developer tools companies in the world. That's why we're so excited to share that Dan Stowell is joining BuildBuddy's engineering team.

Dan joins us from Vercel, where he was a Director of Engineering. Prior to Vercel, Dan was the Head of Engineering at Replit and a Principal Engineer at Spotify.

We look forward to working alongside Dan to build the future of developer tools.

Welcome to BuildBuddy, Dan!

We discovered a bug in Bazel that was causing builds with --remote_download_minimal to download all output artifacts.

A fix has been submitted upstream to the Bazel repository and will be included in the Bazel 9.x release. It will also be cherry-picked back to versions 8.2.0 and 7.6.0.

Users on older versions of Bazel can work around this issue by setting --experimental_remote_cache_ttl to a large value, such as 10000d, with some caveats.

Upgrading Bazel and the related dependencies can sometimes lead to unexpected issues. These issues can range from build failures to runtime errors, and generally, they can be hard to troubleshoot.

So today, we will discuss how to narrow down the root cause of build failures after a dependency upgrade using git bisect.

At BuildBuddy, our mission is to bring the world's best developer tools to every company. A core part of that mission involves building systems and infrastructure that can handle the scale of the world's largest enterprises. That's why we're so excited to share that Vanja Pejovic is joining BuildBuddy's engineering team.

Vanja joins us from Google, where he spent over 12 years as a Software Engineer. He brings with him his experience working on Google's internal RBE (remote build execution) system, Forge.

We look forward to working alongside Vanja to build the future of developer tools.

Welcome to BuildBuddy, Vanja!

At BuildBuddy, our mission is to bring the world's best developer tools to every company. A core part of that mission involves building around the open source Bazel ecosystem to give every engineer fast, reproducible, and correct builds.

That's why we're so excited to share that Fabian Meumertzheim has joined BuildBuddy as a Staff Software Engineer. His contributions to Bazel have already greatly benefited BuildBuddy users, and Fabian will continue to focus on open source Bazel contributions in his role with us.

Fabian is a maintainer of Bazel's rules_go, gazelle, rules_jni, and with_cfg. He's also a regular contributor to the Bazel Slack, and has been the most prolific Bazel contributor over the past couple of years that's not currently employed by Google.

Fabian joins us from Code Intelligence, where he worked on building tools for fuzz testing.

We look forward to working alongside Fabian to build the future of developer tools.

Welcome to BuildBuddy, Fabian!

The promise of Bazel is the promise of fast builds. So what do you do if your build was slow? Curse out the developer that convinced your company to migrate to Bazel? Of course not! You’d never do that, right? 🙂

BuildBuddy is here to help. Bazel provides a lot of helpful information to debug slow builds, but it can be overwhelming to know where to look.

Do you have an iOS app, or really any Apple-based project, that you want to migrate to Bazel? With this guide I'll show you how to migrate your project, using the Mastodon iOS project as an example.

We will use iOS based rules in the example migration, but similar rules exist in rules_apple for the other Apple platforms, including macOS, watchOS, tvOS, and visionOS.

The completed migration is available in my fork of mastodon-ios. You can follow along with the changes made in the following sections by checking out this commit first. At the end of some sections there will be a link to a new commit that includes the changes mentioned up to that point.

In our last post, we summarized the changes that were in the Bazel 7.0 release. There were a lot of changes though, so it can be hard to determine which ones are impactful to you and why.

Don't worry, we've got your back. In this post we highlight the changes that help BuildBuddy users build even faster!

Bazel 7.0 includes over 3,700 changes since 6.0. It's the latest major release, following the release of 6.0 in December of last year, and it's Bazel's fourth LTS release.

Since there were so many changes, many of them quite impactful, I felt I needed to review them all and provide a nice summary for y'all.

We’re excited to announce a podman performance improvement that makes pulling container images about ten times faster on BuildBuddy’s hosted execution service, lowering customer build and test times and improving our ability to autoscale the BuildBuddy executor pool. Read on for the nitty-gritty details.

Another year, another Bazelcon! This year's edition was held in Munich, Germany, and featured two days of talks by Bazel maintainers, contributers, and users. Among the Bazel users represented as this year's conference were: Booking.com, RabbitMQ, Spotify, Stripe, Uber, and more.

Here are some of the highlights:

• Jim talked about improvements we've made to the trends page to help users find and fix strange builds.
• Maggie explained how we're using user fault file descriptors (UFFD) and FUSE to clone micro-VMs over the network, keeping CI runner Bazel analysis caches hot, and speeding up workflows by up to 8x.
• Son dove deep on supporting multi-platform builds in a monorepo.
• Brentley co-lead a Birds of a Feather session with Lyft's Keith Smiley focused on Bazel-on-iOS.
• We co-hosted a well-attended happy hour together with Google Cloud open to all conference attendees.
• We had a great time meeting a bunch of our amazing customers, and other folks passionate about Bazel.

More details below!

New York City – July 18, 2023 – BuildBuddy, which provides an enterprise software for the Bazel ecosystem, announces its inclusion in the first edition of the Redpoint InfraRed 100, a comprehensive list of the next 100 promising private companies in Cloud Infrastructure. This curated selection of companies represents the next generation of leaders in the industry, poised to make a significant impact in the cloud infrastructure market.

Redpoint Ventures is a leading venture capital firm with a diverse portfolio of successful companies including Twilio, Looker, Nextdoor, Ramp, Stripe, Nubank, HashiCorp, Snowflake, Netflix, Hims, and more. In celebration of this accolade, BuildBuddy CEO Siggi Simonarson is joining Redpoint at Nasdaq alongside other InfraRed 100 company leaders to discuss the future of cloud infrastructure.