Building JavaScript at Scale

Over the last years the web tooling has evolved dramatically. Popular tools, such as Angular CLI and Create React App provide well encapsulated build that “just works!” Over time, however, we started building larger applications. Often so big that the time between code update and page reload takes tens of seconds instead of milliseconds. This is not only annoying but also reduces our productivity. An organization, which hit this problem early on is Google. To make engineers working on large applications productive, Google developed Bazel – a tool for building applications at scale. In this talk we’ll see how Bazel allows us to reduce our build time of our large applications in orders of magnitude! We’ll explain how it compiles our code in parallel, or even up in the ☁️. In the last part of the presentation, we’ll see how to use Bazel for our JavaScript at scale.