Aspect Build, built on Bazel

Nov 17, 20213 min read

We've been hard at work building a great consulting business at Aspect. We are helping some large companies like Robinhood and Boston Dynamics migrate their build, test, and CI systems to Bazel. However, it's clear from all our engagements that Bazel...

Configuring Bazel's Downloader

Nov 11, 20212 min read

Bazel has a built-in downloader that's used for many things. It has a separate cache from the repository cache, so even if some repository rule re-runs, you won't have to fetch from the internet. It's also configurable, though this is undocumented. S...

Bazel can write to the source folder!

Nov 10, 20214 min read

Bazel is Google's open-sourced build tool. When used internally at Google, it comes along with a bunch of idioms which Googlers naturally take for granted, and associate with Bazel. These can accidentally become part of the accepted dogma around Baze...

Stamping Bazel builds with selective delivery

Nov 10, 20214 min read

The obvious next step after building a nice CI pipeline around Bazel is Continuous Deployment. So no surprise that one of the frequent questions on Bazel slack is How do I release the artifacts built by Bazel? and the answer is really not well docu...

Bazel: what you give, what you get

Jun 10, 20214 min read

There are a few ways I like to describe Bazel to an engineer who hasn't used it. If they have used similar build tools like Gradle or Make, I'll usually start with comparing the configuration affordances or differences in execution strategies. But mo...

What is a build system and what is CI?

Jun 1, 20212 min read

For a long time, I thought I knew the answer to that question. A build system understands your software, how to build and test it. And a CI is a loop that runs the build system on a server. When I was the tech lead for Angular CLI, I asked a lot of o...