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This post explains how the Slack/Quip build team reduced 60-minute build times by applying software engineering principles (caching and parallelization) to their Bazel-based build pipeline.
•Build performance is modeled as a directed acyclic graph (DAG) where targets have explicit inputs, outputs, and commands
•Caching works best when build units are hermetic (only use declared inputs) and idempotent (same inputs always produce same outputs)
•Granularity of cache keys directly impacts cache hit rate — smaller, more focused build units yield better cache performance
•Parallelization requires rigorously defined input/output boundaries so work can be distributed across CPU cores or remote build clusters
•Bazel enforces hermeticity via sandboxing and automatically handles caching, parallelization, and minimal rebuild of only affected targets
This summary was automatically generated by AI based on the original article and may not be fully accurate.