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Boston: Around the World with Bazel in Watercolors

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

Boston is my second favorite city, after New York, of course! More on why below. It was a 1.5 day trip to meet the Boston Bazel community on the way to NYC from another San Francisco visit. Given the short trip, I only got a chance to do a tiny watercolor - see the cultural notes. However, I’ve gone back to Boston during my family vacation in Cape Cod, so I have much more to share in the form of my daily watercolor inspiration from the various day trips we’ve done on the Cape!

Boston Watercolors

Boston highlights

  • Happy team Fuchsia tree

    • Despite being in Boston many times, I learned about the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum from a colleague, and toured it in the last hour before closing. It is known to the general public for its 1990 heist more than the remarkable art collection. This quick tree fuchsia in the museum garden was my only chance to watercolor. I wasn’t pleased with it, but that’s the best I got in Boston.
    • This trip was also an opportunity for a team member to give a talk and even play a piano duo with our meetup host at the meetup after-party.
    • Notes on culture: I call Boston a smaller, cleaner version of New York. I love it for its river walks that remind me of my hometown in Ukraine, for its culture, and for a buzzing student atmosphere given the many excellent universities in and around the city.

  • Happy customers

    • The highlight of the trip was the Bazel meetup which we hosted, and the opportunity to meet with our customers. At the time we just finished onboarding MongoDB, so it was helpful to get their product feedback.

  • More happy customers

    • We partnered with Zoox to host the Bazel meetup and were joined by engineers from Google, DataDog, Boston Dynamics, Motional and more.
    • Zoox talked about challenges with their then in-hose remote execution. Managing large complex clusters is quite a headache, and open source projects have limitations when it comes to getting the best cost and performance. This is what we’ve invested the past two years perfecting at EngFlow, presented in our BazelCon 2024 talk.
    • The EngFlow meetup talk was an interactive Q&A about "The many caches of Bazel", as documented in the blog.
    • An engineer from Motional talked about no-spill coverage for Bazel, which he defined as making sure that if a line in a code component is shown to be covered in the report, that's because it ran in that compoonent's tests and not some reverse dependency of that component's tests.
    • We had a surprise visitor from Google NYC who talked about the mobile install implemented in Starlark with a call to action to try it out. This package deploys Android applications and is now written in Starlark and is open sourced by Google.

My journey visiting our customers and future customers continues to Europe! First to Amsterdam where we co-hosted a Bazel meetup with Booking.com, then to Barcelona, where we got all our EngFlow colleagues together for our annual company-wide summit. So, Amsterdam and Barcelona are on the itinerary, with lots of Bazel and some watercolors!