Bonus Episode: Bazel with Julio Merino

Build systems coordinate all the steps to transform source code into a production application. Bazel is a build system and testing tool that was first released in 2015 as a free and open-source port of Google’s internal build system called Blaze.

Historically, each language has its own build system which can create complexity when developing applications that use many languages. Bazel is special because it’s a polyglot system with unified support for many languages.

To handle build configuration, Bazel uses the Starlark language which has syntax inspired by Python. This is a key part of what contributes to Bazel’s growing popularity.

Julio Merino is a Senior Software Engineer at Snowflake, and before that worked at Google and Microsoft. He joins the podcast today to talk about Bazel.