#BazelCon 2021 Wrap Up

Posted by Joe Hicks, Product Manager, Core Developer

The apps, platforms, and systems that the Bazel community builds with Bazel touch the lives of people around the world in ways we couldn’t have imagined. Through BazelCon, we aim to connect Bazel enthusiasts, the Bazel team, maintainers, contributors, users, and friends in an inclusive and welcoming environment. At BazelCon, the community demonstrates the global user impact of the community—with some quirky and carefully crafted talks, a readout on the State-of-Bazel, an upfront discussion on “Implicit Bias Mitigation,” and community sharing events that remind us that we are not alone in our efforts to build a better world, one line of code at a time.

At BazelCon, the community shared over 24 technical sessions with the 1400+ registrants, which you can watch here at your own pace. Make sure you check out:

• “Reproducible builds with Bazel” — Stories about the meaning of "hermetic" and how to achieve it in the context of builds and a meditation on the aesthetic aspects of build reproducibility.
• “Embedded Platform Testing with Remote Execution” — Leverage Remote Execution to speed up and simplify builds while testing on embedded hardware.
• “Bazelizing a Gigantic iOS App” — Lessons learned from migrating millions lines of code, decade-old iOS App to Bazel
• “Build Custom Silicon with Bazel” — Design custom silicon with the same workflow you use to build software with Bazel.
• “Implicit Bias Mitigation: Making the Unconscious Conscious” — Reviews the concept of implicit bias and tactics for mitigating it both personally and professionally in the broader context of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging.
• “Streamlining VMware's Open Source License Compliance” — Solving the complexities of identifying and tracking open-source software (OSS) to comply with license requirements by using Bazel to create an accurate bill of materials containing OSS and third-party packages during a build.

Attendees were able to interact with the community and engage with the Bazel team through a series of “Birds of a Feather” (BoF) sessions and a live Q&A session. You can find all of the BoF presentations and notes here.

As announced, soon we will be releasing Bazel 5.0, the updated version of our next generation, multi-language, multi-platform build functionality that includes a new external dependency system, called bzlmod, for you to try out.

We’d like to thank everyone who helped make BazelCon a success: presenters, organizers, Google Developer Studios, contributors, and attendees. If you have any questions about BazelCon, you can reach out to bazelcon-planning@google.com.

We hope that you enjoyed #BazelCon and "Building Better with Bazel".