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Sydney: Around the World with Bazel in Watercolors

This article is part of the series "Around the World with Bazel in Watercolors".

As the images hint, I was mostly inspired by the rich Tasmanian landscape, which is where we went on a family vacation. I did, however, sandwich that week between working for a week in Sydney and a week in San Francisco. In Sydney I couldn’t pass on an opportunity to meet with our customers while visiting family, and to gather local engineers passionate about Bazel (all 10 of them! 😃) from Canva, Splunk, Snap, MongoDB, and more for a Bazel meetup.

Sydney Watercolors

Tasmania is gorgeous, so I found multiple 5-10 minute intervals for sketching during my week off. That’s just the right amount of time for my patience with these — I don’t use pencil, go straight to color, and try to capture what I see as fast as I can on 4x6 watercolor paper cards! Worth noting that I am quite limited by the 12 colors and limited blending quality of a waterbrush, but nothing beats the portability and ease of use! Tasmania is great for road trips. Although I couldn’t act on a customer’s advice to spend 2 weeks there, I packed several of his ideas, and explored three major areas in five days (Freycinet, Cradle Mountain, Cataract Gorge) and two airports (Hobart, Launceston) for a reasonable balance of driving, hiking and sightseeing (ok, just don’t ask my daughter!)

Sydney Highlights

  • Happy team

    • Our customer base was growing, and we recognized the need for APAC coverage. Months of virtual interviews have not led to a hire, putting odd time zone coverage pressure on the team.
    • Our extraordinary external recruiting partner, Louise Ogilvy, identified a number of local candidates in Sydney, so we scheduled ample in-person meetings during my visit, and following this trip hired our first APAC team member.
    • We’re now hiring more in APAC and around the world!
    • Notes on culture: I must admit, Aussie pronunciation took me some time to get accustomed to, and my local family members informed me that they don’t actually say “g-day mate!” I also learned about their “bin chickens” and saw them in action. To find a unique gift, I asked an Aussie engineer in San Francisco what he misses and cannot easily get in the US. The response: TimTams! So I brought a whole bunch for the family and for our customers in San Francisco.

  • Happy customers

    • Canva embarked on their massive Javascript/Typescript migration from Webpack and other tools to Bazel, and throughout that process discovered significant customization required on top of open source rules to work well for their use case, writing their own custom rules. We have had several customers over the years face a similar challenge, and there are multiple efforts by companies to share their experience and code, for example this talk from Airbnb and a code sample.
    • Onsite customer visits helped capture user journeys from multiple angles in a day: leadership/principal engineer, platform engineer, product engineer, CI team. These are valuable insights into how we develop our developer experience UI to be impactful for each type of user persona.
    • In-person meetings helped assess customer happiness level better than surveys and regular virtual calls, which may be attributed to a more subtle culture for escalation. So we prioritized efforts on both teams following this visit, and reached the highest customer happiness level after project completion.

  • More happy customers

    • At our Bazel meetup, hosted by Canva with attendees from Splunk, Snap, MongoDB, Rokt and more, engineers from multiple companies reported seeing the impact Bazel has on their slow and non-incremental C++ builds. Implementing an efficient caching solution, as several of EngFlow customers alluded to with the use of our platform, is helping accelerate the migration to Bazel. A caching solution that includes RBE helps ensure your code is compatible with remote execution as you migrate, and avoids rework in the future.
    • A leader of a massive C++ code migration shared that they were using CI as pseudo RBE with over 3000 remote invocations, went back to the drawing board, and spent a year to make it properly RBE compatible. “If we could go back, we would invest in RBE and get it to work for a small part first, then migrate.”
    • We formed a close partnership with Google Cloud - Australia, and a visit to their Sydney office was informative about the software market in the region - lots of companies using legacy platforms are embracing cloud migrations!

Since I strategically scheduled my Sydney to New York route via San Francisco, stay tuned for San Francisco Bazel, Buck2 and Developer Experience insights and watercolors!