We manage the build pipeline that delivers Quip and Slack Canvas’s backend. A year ago, we were chasing exciting ideas to help engineers ship better code, faster. But we had one huge problem: builds took 60 minutes. With a build that slow, the whole pipeline gets less agile, and feedback doesn’t come to engineers until far too late.
We fixed this problem by combining modern, high-performance build tooling (Bazel) with classic software engineering principles. Here’s how we did it.
Thinking About Build (and Code) Performance
Imagine a simple application. It has a backend server that provides an API and data storage, and a frontend that presents the user interface. Like many modern applications, the frontend and backend are decoupled; they can be developed and delivered independently.
The graph of this build looks like this:
