Skip to content

2025

Not all builds are made equal: Using priorities to expedite remote execution of the builds and tests that matter most

TL;DR

Imagine reading this post on your internal Slack:

⚠ Please hold off on pushing your PRs for a bit until the patch release is fully cut. We don't have enough capacity to handle all the load and the patch is blocked because of that.

Ouch.

But let's be real: not all builds are made equal - some builds are more urgent than others. Like here, when creating a patch release, and wanting to expedite the builds required for it over others.

Yet there's got to be a better solution than asking everyone else to not push changes.

Migrating to Bazel Modules (a.k.a. Bzlmod) - Fixing and Patching Breakages

In the previous Bzlmod post, we covered writing your own Bazel module extensions to adapt your own setup code for dependencies that aren't Bzlmod compatible. However, there are other Bzlmod incompatibilities and related breakages that module extensions alone can't fix, such as forbidden API usage or Windows path length errors.

This post shows you how to patch your dependencies and covers several situations where patching is the only solution. We'll describe how to create and apply patches for your dependencies, if you can't wait for upstream fixes (or contribute them yourself).

What I learned in Colombia

EngFlow has multiple entities around the world, one of which is in Colombia. This year we’ve chosen Colombia as the site for our 2025 Leadership Summit, and I added a few days and weekends to explore the country with our team members, see how they live and meet their families. It’s been an incredible experience visiting Medellin, El Retiro, Itagui, Cali and Bogota, and I’ve captured a few learnings from this trip in a blog.

Colombia team photos

Migrating to Bazel Modules (a.k.a. Bzlmod) - Module Extensions

So far, we've covered relatively easy Bzlmod fixes, how to hold runfiles and pkg_tar correctly, and how to access canonical repo names when absolutely necessary. Now we'll discuss replacing WORKSPACE statements with your own module extensions. You can use them to wrap your project's setup macros, and to adapt external repositories that aren't Bzlmod compatible to work with your Bzlmodified project.