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San Francisco: Around the World with Bazel in Watercolors

Golden Gate Bridge Watercolors

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

The Sydney to New York route was strategically scheduled via San Francisco to connect with our customers, employees and future customers there—and do some watercolors!

To recover from a 15 hour Sydney to San Francisco flight, I racked up 40 km of up and down the hill walking that weekend! I don’t have enough experience with infrastructure (other than software), so I mostly painted flowers and simple landscapes. But since the Golden Gate bridge was such a prominent part of the landscape no matter where I went (Twin Peaks, Fort Mason, Sausalito), I gave it a shot.

The first image was from Twin Peaks. I was quite disappointed. So, I continued to practice on my second trip to SF this year, and finally got the bridge shape that looks more or less recognizable, painting it from the hike in Sausalito.

SF Trees Watercolors

San Francisco highlights

  • Happy team

    • This trip allowed me to learn a lot about our Bay Area EngFlow team members, and to experience thinking fast on our feet while managing to make it through tight schedules and tight connections. Together we’ve persevered through rapid plan adjustments and fast walks to make train schedules between Light Rail and Caltrain.
    • Notes on culture: Every time I am in San Francisco, I aim to walk everywhere, especially between customer meetings in the city. I notice every time that not as many people walk on the streets compared to NYC. Perhaps steep hills may have something to do with it? While I can walk the streets of NYC for hours, I noticed my lack of stamina with uphill walks. Thankfully I have a team member who’s helped me practice them at these hill climbing meetings!

  • Happy customers

    • This trip was an opportunity to get feedback on our new capabilities created in 2023, such as CI Runners, cross region cache replication and self hosted MyEngFlow as we did 10 on-sites in the Bay Area.
    • On-sites helped us understand the internal pressures some of our customers face with Bazel migration, with IDE integration with Bazel still being a major point of concern (VSCode and IntelliJ came up in particular). Product teams are only comfortable giving up some of their non-Bazel workflow and tools when there are sufficient benefits of speed and cost that are achieved with the Bazel migration. Remote cache and RBE play a key role in demonstrating that impact.
    • An important trend we have observed is that multiple companies are migrating between cloud providers, e.g. between GCP and AWS. Therefore, having a flexible solution that runs on any cloud is essential to help our customers minimize their cloud costs while maintaining the same level of functionality and impact that comes with using the EngFlow platform.

  • More happy customers

    • From the early days of EngFlow we set the goal of serving all developers and meeting our customers where they are in their build system journey. This trip provided a great opportunity to meet our Buck2 partners at Meta and the first major C++ Buck2 customer of EngFlow. The Buck2 ecosystem is still brand new, and the EngFlow team is contributing code especially related to RBE compatibility, as announced by Meta based on testing with us.
    • Multiple companies use Gazelle for C++ migrations as well as ongoing build file maintenance, and some of them have developed custom extensions (e.g., Tesla, MongoDB). We are discussing a community effort to create open source tooling that can be shared by others. Let me know if you’d like to be a part of it!

There is always a good reason to be in the San Francisco Bay Area—to meet with our customers, future customers, investors and team members. So this year there will be more trips! Join me at our upcoming events, such as BazelCon where EngFlow is a platinum sponsor (which ensures the conference is free for all to attend), and the Build Meetup, hosted by EngFlow and Meta at the Meta office. Let’s do more SF Bazel + Watercolors!

Finally, after a 3 week trip away from home, I have reached New York City, which is the next chapter in this Around the World with Bazel in Watercolors series!