Posted on in Programming
Remote cache misses are where build-system optimism goes to get humbled.
The sales pitch for remote caching is simple: someone already built the thing, so you should not have to build it again. In a healthy Bazel setup, that can be beautiful. CI writes reusable outputs. Developers pull the same …
Posted on in Programming
Remote build caching is worth it when the cache saves more engineering time than it costs in build discipline, infrastructure, debugging, and trust.
That sounds obvious, but it is the part teams skip. They see long CI times, slow local builds, and a build system with the word "remote" in …
Posted on in Programming
Bazel's old WORKSPACE model had a long run. It was powerful, familiar, and
occasionally the place where every build-system shortcut in the company went to
hide. But the center of gravity has moved. Bazel 8 disabled WORKSPACE by
default, Bazel 9 removed support, and the modern dependency story is
MODULE …
Posted on in Programming
Bazel 9.1.0 is not the kind of release that should make an engineering team drop everything and schedule a build-system migration party. It is a minor LTS release in the Bazel 9 line, published on April 20, 2026, and most of the changes are incremental. That is good …
Posted on in Programming
Bazel 8.0.0 was not just another build-tool release. It was the release where Bazel stopped politely suggesting that teams should modernize their dependency management and started making the new world harder to ignore.
The headline changes were Bzlmod becoming the default, WORKSPACE being
disabled by default, and more …
Posted on in Programming
When working with large Bazel code repositories, it’s not always clear how targets are distributed across directories. Understanding how many targets each top-level directory contains can help gauge complexity, identify hotspots, or guide refactoring efforts.
While Bazel itself doesn’t have a direct command to provide a “count of …
