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New York: Around the World with Bazel in Watercolors

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

I cannot call New York a trip, as it’s my home, but we do have customers, team members and future customers here. This led to a few events that included working with the team and bringing customers and friends together over food with a touch of Bazel!

New York Floral Watercolors

New York is wonderful in the spring, so these are some of my watercolors painted in NYC. The first is an inspiration from a photo shared by a friend. I don’t usually paint from photos, but it was so beautiful, and there were magnolias in bloom all around me in New York at the time. The second one is the bouquet my daughter gave me for Mother’s Day last year. The third was me copying a painting of a Belorussian born artist who lives in Pennsylvania, and had an exhibition at a Japanese cultural center in New York!

New York highlights

  • Happy team

    • New York is our business hub with several team members across finance, HR and sales engineering. With our busy remote work schedules, we end up getting together when other non-NY team members come in town, and of course when we meet our customers and future customers!
    • Notes on culture: I love New York’s fast pace and accessibility, where you can always discover something new and combine a variety of experiences sometimes in the same building. Our head of People Ops introduced me to a place for our team and customers day that combines the finance/banking feel, modern co-working space, and Bergamo’s bar inspired by NYC Speakeasy history.

  • Happy customers

    • Over the past year we brought our customers & friends together for several Happy Hour events. 2024 was tough for many tech employees, so in our last year’s meetup we included recently laid off engineers from companies like Spotify, Google, among others, connecting them with our customers for future opportunities.
    • This year we went back to Bergamo’s and heard a new vibe from our customers: engineering productivity is a big focus area, with many teams looking to get insights into optimizing their developer pipelines, and identify the best opportunities for investment based on analysis of flaky tests and slow builds. We are partnering with our customers in developing the next level of build and test analytics and insights!
    • Another important insight is that AI has finally penetrated developer experience organizations, and many of the devex teams we’ve spoken with are seeing good value with AI co-assisted IDEs, including even getting a pretty good Starlark code generated!

  • More happy customers

    • Our NYC highlights include a major big bank Tech Innovation Forum, where we were invited to present to their CIO and leadership team how EngFlow is enabling companies with large codebases to ship code faster.
    • Based on my engineering experience at a bank, the codebases in banks are generally organized by team/product area, programming language, and sometimes access controls. You won’t get far with monorepo evangelism. The majority of the code is typically written in Java, Python and C++, although you may find every language, depending on the bank’s age and acquisition history. This means there is a cultural shift that needs to happen to recognize the benefits of "no clean builds" => "incremental builds" and cross repo based testing. We are excited to have the opportunity to be a meaningful part of this culture shift and productivity impact.
    • At several on-sites we heard the familiar story: Python Bazel rules are inadequate; typescript migration to Bazel is challenging but can be done if you’re willing to dedicate significant effort to it; and the success of a Bazel migration depends on how well the team is equipped to support it longer term. To that effect we created a Bazel training curriculum to help companies build and maintain the required expertise. We also continue to create Bazel training content on our blog, with topics relevant for the community - currently that includes sharing our experience with Bzlmod migrations.

I have lived in NYC since our refuge from Ukraine several decades ago, and still consider it my favorite city to live in due to its incredible blend of culture, arts, business, tech, and now of course because we have employees and customers here! The only US city I would consider living in after NYC is Boston, which is, coincidentally, the next stop on my journey Around the world with Bazel in Watercolors!