There are lots of small, satisfying moments in the day-to-day lives of software developers. From finding and deleting dead code, to writing tests that pass on the first run (actually), to receiving UX mocks that call for simplifying the frontend code, those little joys are a pleasant treat! We’re excited to share a small new BuildBuddy Build Result UI feature that we think fits into this category: keyboard shortcuts.

Keyboard shortcuts can be enabled in the personal preferences menu on the settings page in the app. Once enabled, a help menu explaining the shortcuts can be toggled using ? to show and Esc to hide. There’s also a clickable button to close it just in case… if only Vim had one too!

I implemented this feature during a hackathon a couple of months ago and I like how it saves me a second or two on some common tasks in the Build Result UI. My favorite shortcut is Shift-c to copy invocation page links. I use it once or twice a day to share a link in Slack along with the confused emoji.

We love receiving feedback from customers, if you’re excited about this or have other shortcuts you’d like to see in the UI, hit us up on Slack or at hello@buildbuddy.io.

To fulfill our mission of bringing the world's best developer tools to every company, keeping our business running smoothly is as important as ensuring our customers' builds run smoothly. That's why we're excited to share that Grace Chuang is joining BuildBuddy!

Grace joins us from Google, where she spent 5+ years working on Product Strategy and Operations. Prior to Google, Grace spent 3 years at J.P. Morgan.

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

Welcome to BuildBuddy, Grace!

Since the first commit of rules_xcodeproj, we’ve been committed to it being community driven and community owned. Early in rules_xcodeproj’s development, multiple companies started using the project, while also putting forth significant contributions. And all throughout its development we’ve solicited feedback from users on how the project is working for them, not working for them, and what we should be focusing on next.

Today we are taking the next step in this commitment; we are solidifying the community ownership of rules_xcodeproj by donating it to the Mobile Native Foundation!

Today we released version 1.3.2 of rules_xcodeproj!

This is a pretty exciting release, as it adds support for multiple Xcode configurations (e.g. Debug and Release). Since early in rules_xcodeproj’s development, being able to have more than the default Debug configuration has been highly requested. We would have implemented support much sooner, but because rules_xcodeproj accounts for every file path and compiler/linker flag, in order to have rock solid indexing and debugging support, it wasn’t an easy task.

Almost exactly one year ago I wrote the first commit for rules_xcodeproj. Like a lot of software engineers, I’m pretty bad at estimating, and thought that I would be able to finish 1.0 in 2 to 4 months 😅. The longer development cycle was a result of an increased scope and level of quality that I came to expect for a proper 1.0 release. Over the course of the year, I believe the project has risen to meet my expectations, and today I’m happy to announce the release of version 1.0 of rules_xcodeproj!

At BuildBuddy, our mission is to bring the world's best developer tools to every company. A big part of that mission involves building a team folks with deep industry experience helping companies build and scale their systems.

That's why we're so excited to share that Son Luong Ngoc has joined BuildBuddy as a Solutions Engineer. His work with Bazel at scale will directly benefit BuildBuddy users and customers.

Son Luong is a contributor to bazel, git, rules_go, rules_docker, bazel-gazelle, and more. He's also a regular contributor to the Bazel Slack and maintains an incredible blog that explains the inner workings of Bazel.

Son Luong joins us from Qarik, where he helped large enterprises with Bazel and scalable build infrastructure. Prior to Qarik, Son Luong was an SRE at Booking.com, where he helped scale their Bazel monorepo.

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

Welcome to BuildBuddy, Son Luong!

Bazel 6.0 includes over 3,100 changes since 5.4. It's the latest major release, following the release of 5.0 in January of this year, and it's Bazel's third 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.

To fulfill our mission of bringing the world's best developer tools to every company, the most imporant thing we can do is hire incredible Software Engineers with experience building and scaling great software. That's why we're excited to share that Jim Hollenbach is joining BuildBuddy's engineering team!

Jim joins us from Google, where he was a Staff Software Engineer. He spent over 10 years at Google working across Search, Maps, and more.

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

Welcome to BuildBuddy, Jim!

Earlier this month we wrapped up the 2022 Bazelcon conference in New York City. The conference featured talks by many prominent Bazel users including Lyft, Spotify, Tesla, Slack, Stripe, Tinder, Tecton, Coinbase, Uber, more.

Here's are some of the highlights from the conference:

• We gave a talk previewing the upcoming BuildBuddy 3.0 release
• Six companies that are BuildBuddy Enterprise customers presented on the main stage
• We co-hosted a Bazelcon happy hour with Google Cloud that had over 200 attendees
• We shared what we've been working on over the past year with rules_xcodeproj
• We gave away 370 BuildBuddy shirts and 1600 BuildBuddy stickers
• We finally got to meet so many of incredible customers & open source contributors in person!

Tweets, talks, and pictures from the event below!

When you use Buildbuddy with Bazel to build and test software, Buildbuddy captures information about each Bazel invocation, such as number of builds, build duration, remote cache performance, and more. Buildbuddy has a Trends page to visualize trends in this data over time.

The trends page allows you to see how improvements you are making to your builds affects your average build duration and other stats. It also exposes areas that might need improving. For example, if you see the cache hit rate go down over time, your build might have some non-deterministic build actions that could be improved, or some newly introduced dependencies that result in more frequent cache invalidations.