We are a small 20ish dev company using a monorepo with mostly python. Our tooling is Bazel and Drone.

- Ease of onboarding. Being able to quickly build or test any target is awesome for the new employee.

- Ease of collaboration. I can see all of the code easily and can learn from these patterns. I can also quickly contribute or extend apis and fix all usages without concern for breaking changes.

Our use of Bazel quickly gets us around git scale issues by enabling external dependencies that can be loaded into the workspace without fully vendoring everything.

hu3

I'm interested in using Bazel at work and would appreciate any input:

1) Was it hard to change projects and workflow to use Bazel (assuming the company didn't use Bazel at first)?

2) Is the dev workflow too different than typical git branch/commit/PR?

justinwp

1) This is mostly dependent on language and the rules available. In our case python is a mess regarding 2/3 compatibility and external dependencies. There is a roadmap being executed on to fix these issues. Regarding our transition, it was slow at first as we pulled in services and tackled some tech debt. We wrote a handful of custom rules that helped. Bazel does have the ability to import repositories and that can be used as a little bit of a crutch in the process.

2. Exactly the same process except there is a single pr instead of multiple across multiple repositories.

One of our challenges was integrating one of our public repos into our repo and that is more of a difference in release patterns(semantic versioning vs nightlies). We use copybara to help with this problem.

- https://github.com/google/copybara