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.

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!