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  • 5 min read

2025 EngFlow Global Summit - Five Takeaways

Team celebrating 5 years of EngFlow and 10 years of Bazel in Salzburg

Summit kickoff dinner where we celebrated 10 years of Bazel and 5 years of EngFlow.

Once again, the EngFlow team gathered for our annual Global Summit—convening this time in the beautiful city of Salzburg, Austria. This year’s summit was a milestone event—bringing the team together from around the world to celebrate five years of EngFlow. We also toasted to ten years of Bazel (thanks to our CTO Ulf Adams, our engineers, and the many others who have contributed so much to the community over the last decade). In keeping with the anniversary theme, here are five takeaways from the summit to give you a glimpse into our time together:

Migrating to Bazel Modules (a.k.a. Bzlmod) - Repo Names, Again…

The apparent and canonical repository name schema under Bzlmod is the gift that keeps on giving. Much of what it has to give is quite good—once you learn how to really hold it right. Which is to say, to avoid holding canonical repo names at all. That's what the three previous "Repo Names..." posts in this series were all about.

Those previous posts, however, pertained to using BUILD rules, or when accessing runfiles. In those situations, solutions exist to avoid handling canonical repo names directly as a consumer.

If you maintain a Bazel rule set, or need to fix a rule set upon which your project depends, this is the post for you. We'll see how improper repo name usages sneak into rule implementations, and how to shoo them out. Examples include removing canonical repo names from embedded resource paths, filtering lists of target labels, and generating default repository target names. We also discuss removing internal references to your project's own apparent repository name to avoid minor yet preventable issues.

Not all builds are made equal: Using priorities to expedite remote execution of the builds and tests that matter most

TL;DR

Imagine reading this post on your internal Slack:

⚠ Please hold off on pushing your PRs for a bit until the patch release is fully cut. We don't have enough capacity to handle all the load and the patch is blocked because of that.

Ouch.

But let's be real: not all builds are made equal - some builds are more urgent than others. Like here, when creating a patch release, and wanting to expedite the builds required for it over others.

Yet there's got to be a better solution than asking everyone else to not push changes.

Migrating to Bazel Modules (a.k.a. Bzlmod) - Fixing and Patching Breakages

In the previous Bzlmod post, we covered writing your own Bazel module extensions to adapt your own setup code for dependencies that aren't Bzlmod compatible. However, there are other Bzlmod incompatibilities and related breakages that module extensions alone can't fix, such as forbidden API usage or Windows path length errors.

This post shows you how to patch your dependencies and covers several situations where patching is the only solution. We'll describe how to create and apply patches for your dependencies, if you can't wait for upstream fixes (or contribute them yourself).

What I learned in Colombia

EngFlow has multiple entities around the world, one of which is in Colombia. This year we’ve chosen Colombia as the site for our 2025 Leadership Summit, and I added a few days and weekends to explore the country with our team members, see how they live and meet their families. It’s been an incredible experience visiting Medellin, El Retiro, Itagui, Cali and Bogota, and I’ve captured a few learnings from this trip in a blog.

Colombia team photos

Migrating to Bazel Modules (a.k.a. Bzlmod) - Module Extensions

So far, we've covered relatively easy Bzlmod fixes, how to hold runfiles and pkg_tar correctly, and how to access canonical repo names when absolutely necessary. Now we'll discuss replacing WORKSPACE statements with your own module extensions. You can use them to wrap your project's setup macros, and to adapt external repositories that aren't Bzlmod compatible to work with your Bzlmodified project.

  • in engflow
  • 7 min read

EngFlow 2024 Year End Wrap

As we look forward to 2025, we are grateful to our employees, customers, and the broader build community for the continued investment in achieving our mission of making developers productive and happy to keep Engineers in Flow.

Holiday baking

In 2024 EngFlow continued our multi-year track record of exponential growth. This year we onboarded some of the most complex and advanced engineering organizations across autonomous driving, e-commerce, SaaS, finance, and chip manufacturing, resulting in significant developer velocity and cloud cost savings for these teams.

EngFlow has become more than a platform provider - we are elevating the developer experience practice for our customers, continuously pushing the cost and performance innovation, passing the savings directly to our customers. We are connecting engineers working on similar technologies to share best practices and talent across the Bazel, Buck2, Chromium, AOSP, and CMake ecosystems. While doing that, we're enriching our customers with music and are making the planet a greener place (read more about this below)!

How to Evaluate Remote Caching and Execution

Between roughly 2006 to 2008, Google developed remote caching and execution technologies to scale its massive monorepo based software development operation. This platform included Forge, the remote caching and execution platform, and Blaze, a tool for building large multilanguage software projects, eventually open sourced as Bazel. The advantages of this original platform were so obvious that it literally sold itself, and ultimately inspired the EngFlow platform.

Today, EngFlow is one of several competing remote caching and execution products now available in the commercial space. This post describes how we continuously benchmark our own product against different configurations to ensure that we offer the best possible value. We hope that sharing our methodology might help you evaluate whether remote caching or execution is right for your organization.