In software engineering organizations, there are certain practices that keep costs under control even if those seem more expensive at first. Unfortunately, because such practices feel more expensive, teams choose to keep their status quo even when they know it is suboptimal. This choice ends up hurting productivity and morale because planned work is continuously interrupted, which in turn drags project completion. The reason I say seem and not are is because the alternatives to these cost-exp...| Julio Merino (jmmv.dev)
During my 11 years at Google, I can confidently count the number of times I had to do a “clean build” with one hand: their build system is so robust that incremental builds always work. Phrases like “clean everything and try building from scratch” are unheard of. So… you can color me skeptical when someone says that incremental build problems are due to bugs in the build files and not due to a suboptimal build system. The answer lies in having a robust build system, and in this post...| Julio Merino (jmmv.dev)
“Strategies? Will you talk about Bazel’s strategy for world domination 🙀?” No… not exactly that. Dynamic execution has been quite a hot topic in my work over the last few months and I am getting ready to publish a series of posts on it soon. But before I do that, I need to first review Bazel’s execution strategies because they play a big role in understanding what dynamic execution is and how it’s implemented.| Julio Merino (jmmv.dev)
Bazel’s dynamic execution is a feature that makes your builds faster by using remote and local resources, transparently and at the same time. We launched this feature in Bazel 0.21 back in February 2019 along an introductory blog post and have been hard at work since then to improve it. The reason dynamic execution makes builds faster is two-fold: first, because we can hide hiccups in the connectivity to the remote build service; and, second, because we can take advantage of things like per...| Julio Merino (jmmv.dev)
macOS includes a sandboxing mechanism to closely control what processes can do on the system. Sandboxing can restrict file system accesses on a path level, control which host/port pairs can be reached over the network, limit which binaries can be executed, and much more. All applications installed via the App Store are subject to sandboxing. This sandboxing functionality is exposed via the sandbox-exec(1) command-line utility, which unfortunately has been listed as deprecated for at least the...| Julio Merino (jmmv.dev)