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.

By popular demand, we are introducing support for a PostgreSQL database backend for BuildBuddy! You can now use PostgreSQL as a drop-in replacement for MySQL or SQLite just by specifying a PostgreSQL endpoint to your BuildBuddy instance.

BuildBuddy enables fast builds by providing a high-performance cache that stores and serves artifacts, such as the inputs and outputs to your build actions.

Starting today, BuildBuddy customers can provide their own encryption keys that will be used to encrypt and decrypt data stored in the cache. At launch, we are supporting keys managed by Google Cloud Platform KMS and Amazon Web Services KMS.

Recently Meta announced the release of Buck2, their official build tool that was rewritten in Rust. I got a chance to try it and integrate it with BuildBuddy's Remote Cache and Remote Build Execution offerings.

Here are the initial impressions I have after a week of using Buck2.