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> But this is a multi billion dollar solution to problems that 99.99% of companies do not have. I know it's trendy for people to advocate for simple architectu

by SR2Z 2y ago

> But this is a multi billion dollar solution to problems that 99.99% of companies do not have. I know it's trendy for people to advocate for simple architectures, but the honest-to-god truth is that it's insane that builds work ANY OTHER WAY. One of the highest priorities companies should have is to reduce siloing, and I can barely think of a better way to guarantee silos than by having 300 slightly different build systems. There is a reason why Google can take a new grad SWE who barely knows how to code and turn them into a revenue machine. I've worked at several other places but none of them have had internal infrastructure as nice as the monorepo; it was the least amount of stress I've ever felt deploying huge changes. Another amazing thing that I don't see mentioned enough was how robust the automatic deployments with Boq/Annealing/Stubby were. The internal observability library would automatically capture RPC traces from both the client and server, and the canary controller would do a simple p-test on whether or not the new service had a higher error rate than the old one. If it did? The rollback CL would be automatically submitted and you'd get a ping. This might sound meh until I point out that EVEN CONFIG CHANGES were versioned and canaried.

kridsdale3 2y ago
I've worked at the majority of FAANG. Facebook's build system works the same as Googles, because most of FB's infra was made by ex-Googlers around 10-15 years ago. The worst thing I can say about Blaze is basically already pointed out above, sometimes you need to write little notes to the presubmit system to ensure cross-boundary updates. Whatever, it's all text files in the end. The wildest was at Apple. It's just as you said, 300 build systems. Not only that, but 300 source code repositories! Two teams in the same hall that hang out all the time could be using git and svn, for no good reason besides what someone wrote "init" in 20 years ago. There was no cross team communication, by design, because Steve Jobs was paranoid. Their sync mechanism was to build the entire stack once a night, and force everyone to full-reinstall their OS and toolchain to "rebase". Insane.
teaearlgraycold 2y ago
I definitely agree most companies should use a monorepo. Most companies don't need Blaze, though. And the whole rollout system was excellent. I wish that tech was standard but I have a vague idea of how much work that would be to implement and few companies will be able to afford to get that right. Edit: I forgot to mention - I absolutely hated Cider and all of the included plugins. Sure the code at Google was fine but the code editing experience destroyed all of the fun of coding. Is that function signature correct? You'll find out in 45 seconds when the Intellisense completes! And when I was there Copilot was a thing outside of Google but we were not allowed to use any AI (even Google's own AI) to write code. The whole situation was so bad I wrote a few paragraphs about it in my offboarding survey.

by SR2Z 2y ago

kridsdale3 2y ago

I've worked at the majority of FAANG. Facebook's build system works the same as Googles, because most of FB's infra was made by ex-Googlers around 10-15 years ago. The worst thing I can say about Blaze is basically already pointed out above, sometimes you need to write little notes to the presubmit system to ensure cross-boundary updates. Whatever, it's all text files in the end. The wildest was at Apple. It's just as you said, 300 build systems. Not only that, but 300 source code repositories! Two teams in the same hall that hang out all the time could be using git and svn, for no good reason besides what someone wrote "init" in 20 years ago. There was no cross team communication, by design, because Steve Jobs was paranoid. Their sync mechanism was to build the entire stack once a night, and force everyone to full-reinstall their OS and toolchain to "rebase". Insane.

teaearlgraycold 2y ago

I definitely agree most companies should use a monorepo. Most companies don't need Blaze, though. And the whole rollout system was excellent. I wish that tech was standard but I have a vague idea of how much work that would be to implement and few companies will be able to afford to get that right. Edit: I forgot to mention - I absolutely hated Cider and all of the included plugins. Sure the code at Google was fine but the code editing experience destroyed all of the fun of coding. Is that function signature correct? You'll find out in 45 seconds when the Intellisense completes! And when I was there Copilot was a thing outside of Google but we were not allowed to use any AI (even Google's own AI) to write code. The whole situation was so bad I wrote a few paragraphs about it in my offboarding survey.