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EngFlow at BazelCon 2025

The EngFlow team recently wrapped up a successful BazelCon 2025, which marked a significant milestone: the 10th anniversary of Bazel! Seeing the energy and innovation at the conference was especially meaningful for us, as several of us have been involved in BazelCon since its inception, both as organizers and attendees. We're reflecting on the immense growth the community has achieved in the last decade and how it spearheads developer productivity across the world.

EngFlow was a platinum sponsor of the main conference, facilitated several workshops on Training Day, and co-hosted a fun Game Night with JetBrains and VirtusLab. We loved seeing and hearing from many of our customers in-person at BazelCon, as Happy Customers are at the heart of what we do!

This blog brings you highlights from the conference and satellite events.

The EngFlow team at BazelCon 2025

The EngFlow team at BazelCon 2025

Day 0: Training Day

The pre-conference Community Days we've organized at past BazelCons typically featured workshops and bonus talks. This year, we offered a Training Day, focused solely on workshops. Spots filled up quickly for all workshops during the registration period, including three sessions led by EngFlow experts, reflecting the community’s appetite for hands-on content and technical deep-dives.

We had over 100 attendees across workshops with varying levels of Bazel experience, ranging from new users up to Bazel team members at Google. All EngFlow sessions included code on GitHub repositories and hands-on demos designed to illustrate concepts and encourage audience participation. For example, the Bazel Management session became an open dialogue where attendees answered each other's questions and shared their own real world experiences.

If you didn’t catch the trainings in person, check out the recordings:

Visit meetup.build to sign up for (or host) similar events that happen around the world throughout the year.

Day 1 and Day 2 at the Conference

General Sessions and Technical Talks

The overall themes at this year's BazelCon underscored what was on the community's mind: Bzlmod, build performance, and migration strategies.

While not a surprise announcement, Bazel 9 dropping support for WORKSPACE in favor of Bzlmod was a hot topic. To quote the State of the Union update, “WORKSPACE is gone”. This made the Bzlmod Migration Bootcamp workshop especially timely. The good news is that much of the community is already compliant or well into their Bzlmod migration process.

Further reading

Check out the blog series by Mike Bland on migrating to Bazel Modules.

Here are some other updates that caught our attention:

  • New built-in set datatype for Starlark and flag scoping.
  • Responding to the community’s top pain point of documentation and a steep learning curve, preview.bazel.build is now live with the upcoming replacement site for bazel.build. It retains the same content as the original Bazel documentation while making it easier for users to contribute changes, since the new site doesn't rely on Google web infrastructure. Thanks to Alan Mond for leading the charge here!
  • A slew of upcoming and planned features covered in the State of the Union.

To kick off the conference, Jay Conrod, Software Engineer at EngFlow, delivered a part of the Community Update focused on Bazel growth and adoption, specifically about Bzlmod and Gazelle.

Later that morning, EngFlow CEO and co-founder Helen Altshuler, along with Eloise Pozzi, Software Engineer at Canva, gave a talk titled Bazel Build Data: Avoiding Pitfalls in Debugging and Optimizing Builds at Scale. The talk focused on key data sources that build engineers can use to investigate build problems and identify optimization opportunities. To show how all this data comes together in a real-world example investigation, Helen took the audience through a Build Forensics game designed by Jorge Acosta, Product Manager at EngFlow.

EngFlow presenters at BazelCon

EngFlow presenters at BazelCon 2025

Lightning Talks

One of the ways we remain focused on our Happy Customers priority is by functioning as an extension of their developer productivity teams. This partnership enables us to proactively monitor and optimize builds to deliver cost savings and performance improvements. In a lightning talk titled Building at Scale, Gabriel Russo, Software Engineer at Databricks, Yuval Kaplan, Software Engineer at EngFlow, and Helen Altshuler told the story of how our teams collaborated to identify targets that were particularly slow, understand the cause, and come up with a solution. The takeaways from this collaboration also inspired us to integrate these analytical insights into our core platform. Keep an eye out for build forensics features that’ll soon be available as part of the EngFlow Build and Test UI.

Jay Conrod was back on stage to talk about Lightning-Fast Build File Generation with Gazelle Lazy Indexing. Check out his recent blog post to watch the recording and read the talk transcript.

BoF session: AI Breaks Everything

Helen Altshuler and Adam Frankl facilitated a Birds of a Feather session titled AI Breaks Everything: Is Your Build Infrastructure Ready? It was a timely, interactive session that got attendees talking about how AI understands Bazel and how companies can prepare their infrastructure for agentic development. Check out the session summary and take the Bazel and AI: idea exchange survey to be a part of future discussions on this topic.

If you were unable to watch some of the talks in person, here’s a selection of them to catch up on:

Don’t forget to check out the full playlist here.

At the EngFlow Booth: Coffee and Conversations

The EngFlow booth at BazelCon this year was a must-visit for everyone, starting with the delicious Colombian coffee being served up by professional baristas - a nod to our EngFlowers based in Colombia. Our "coffee lab" kept EngFlow-branded espresso drinks flowing from beakers, with attendees saying that it was the "best idea ever!" We had thought-provoking and inspiring conversations with customers and community members who stopped by, often giving live demos of our Build and Test UI.

Visitors also got a sneak preview of the Cluezel game that debuted at Game Night later that day. It proved so popular that on the second day of the conference, we set up an extra table at our booth for attendees to play and enjoy. EngFlow’s sticker game remained strong this year, with the custom BazelCon Atlanta sticker proving to be the favorite. We also had BSI t-shirts and stickers teasing our upcoming Build. Scale. Investigate. world tour.

Coffee and conference goodies

Coffee and conference goodies

Game Night

EngFlow, JetBrains, and VirtusLab co-hosted game night at Skol Brewing in Atlanta. With nearly 100 participants, it was the perfect way to unwind after a day packed with learning. Attendees played Cluezel, a Cluedo-like tabletop game where players had to guess what was going wrong with a Bazel build using hints they collected about CI/CD, Remote Build Execution (RBE), local development, and version control systems.

Antonio Di Stefano, Software Engineer and Vanessa Mejia, Executive Assistant at EngFlow developed this game from scratch in the weeks leading up to BazelCon. What initially began as a game very close to Cluedo evolved into Cluezel as the designers iterated on the gameplay with a focus on interactivity. Who said keeping engineers in flow is all work and no play?

Cluezel at Game Night

Cluezel at Game Night

Looking ahead

BazelCon 2025 was a success! The EngFlow team returned from the conference fully energized by the community and fired up for another year of building and enhancing the platform that keeps engineers in flow.

Being a global remote company, we highly value in-person opportunities like BazelCon to come together with our happy team, happy customers, and the Bazel community. We’re already looking ahead to our 2026 events - first up is Build Meetup Amsterdam, followed by several stops on the Build. Scale. Investigate. World Tour. Head over to meetup.build to sign up for these events and maybe propose one of your own. Until next time!

Contributors: Helen Altshuler, Billy Autrey, Matthew Beckman, Mike Bland, Jay Conrod, Antonio Di Stefano, Vanessa Mejia