Another edition of BazelCon has come to a close. We gathered to discuss what matters most in the world of Bazel, learn, network and spend some quality time with like-minded folks. If you couldn't make it to the event or want a quick refresher on the key takeaways, we’ve put together a brief summary of the highlights.
TL;DR - Recordings playlist, photo album, user survey
Acknowledgments
The success of this year's event is entirely due to our incredible community.
A huge thank you to our sponsors, whose support made it possible to host an event of this scale free of charge.
Thank you to our speakers and trainers for delivering insightful presentations packed with knowledge that sparked many conversations throughout the week.
And to our attendees - both in-person and online - for your questions, hallway discussions, and engagement that truly shape the spirit of BazelCon each year. We gathered a record number of 455 people, exceeding our expectations and giving us much to consider for next events.
BUILD Foundation
Kicking off Day 1 during the Keynote, Helen Altshuler and Chuck Grindel announced the launch of the BUILD Foundation. Governed by the Linux Foundation with initial members ASML, Canva, Datadog, EngFlow, Figma, and Spotify, the Foundation gives the Bazel ecosystem the leadership and sustained investment needed to take on challenges no single organization can solve alone.
Key priorities for the initiative include improving technical documentation, funding maintainers for bazel-contrib repositories, launching developer training and certification, and enhancing software supply chain security.
By formalizing this shared investment, the community aims to keep build times fast and dependable as engineering teams and codebases continue to scale.
To discover more about the launch, explore the initial member perspectives, and find out how your organization can get involved, read the rest of the Linux Foundation press release and watch the Keynote.
Bazel Community Survey 2026
To understand our users and their experiences, as well as to better guide the roadmap, the BUILD Foundation launched a survey to gather your feedback.
More Recaps and Coverage
Want to see the event through the eyes of the attendees? Check out these write-ups from other members of the community:
- BazelCon 2026: My Notes and Observations - by Adin Ćebić
- BazelCon 2026 recap - by Julio Merino
- A Bazel Bard - a summary of the BazelCon 2026 Hallway Track - by Son Luong Ngoc
Recordings
[Training Day] Tuesday, October 13th
Advanced Bazel: Rules Authoring, Performance Tuning and Remote Execution
rules_{js|ts}: JavaScript & TypeScript with Bazel
Build File Generation Using AXL
How Fast Should/Can My Build Be? A Journey to Understand Build Optimization
rules_py: Python Builds with Bazel
[Day 1] Wednesday, October 14th
Keynote: Bazel Community Update
No Token Budget: Why Agentic Software Factories Need Bazel to Maintain Entropy
One Content-Addressed Store, Zero Full Clones: Backing Bazel's Cache and Remote Execution with Lore
Content-Defined Chunking for Bazel
Horapha: Your Personal Warm Bazel
actiond: The quest for a better sandbox
Type-checking Starlark without waiting for Bazel
Taming Configurations Explosion 💥
Where Bazel Clusters Break at Scale: Field Notes from Plaid and the EngFlow Fleet
Taking Humans Out of the Build Loop
bviz: Seeing What Your Bazel Build Is Actually Doing
One Graph to Rule Them All: Scaling Incremental Target Graph Calculations in Monorepos
More expressive platforms with platforms_contrib
Stop Delivering Your Whole Fleet
How Canva Runs Millions of Jest Tests with Bazel
RunfilesGroupInfo: Turning *_binary Runfiles into Optimal Container Layers
[Day 2] Thursday, October 15th
Lessons learned building a zero-sysroot fully hermetic LLVM toolchain for Bazel
rules_rs: {Fast, Hermetic, Ergonomic} - Pick 3
The Sandbox Is a Filesystem: Content-Addressed Bazel Builds on macOS with FSKit
Proving Equivalence in any2bazel Build System Migrations
AI development: Challenges and early learnings for Bazel
Discovering and eliminating 20% of redundant build actions by tracing file system operations
Diffing Millions of Screenshots a Day, Hermetically
Zig Package Manager Integration, Hermetically
No bytes left untracked - Bazel Supply Chain Security
One Build, Many Configurations: Comparing Configuration Features in Bazel and Buck2
Building Uber's Automated Migration Machine on Bazel
Generate build files for new rule sets with Gazelle v2
Distributed hermetic CUDA Clang compilation using Bazel
What Changed? - A Better Watch Protocol for Bazel
Extend Gazelle in Starlark, not Go
A py_binary Should Be Enough: Fast, Simple Python Images with Bazel
Flexibility Is a Trap: How We Sealed Our Bazel Platform at Adobe Scale
BoF notes
Unconference notes:
SkyCache (Remote Analysis Caching) + SkyCache deck
Config Explosion Mitigation Notes 1 & Notes 2
E2E/SystemsTesting (Tests against hermetic environments)
The Psychology of Migration (Organizational struggles & solutions)
Agent Mode (How to improve Bazel for Agentic usage)
Resources
GitHub repository: https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel
Slack chat: https://slack.bazel.build
Google group: bazel-discuss@googlegroups.com
Special Interest Groups (SIG):
Reach out the email(s) listed below if you’d like to be added to the SIG calendar invites.
| SIG | Meeting frequency | Point of contact |
|---|---|---|
| Rules authors | Every two weeks | bazel-contrib@googlegroups.com |
| Android app development | Monthly | ahumesky@google.com |
| Bazel plugin for IntelliJ | Monthly | en@jetbrains.com |
| Remote execution API working group | Monthly | chiwang@google.com |
| Supply chain security / SBOM | Weekly | fwe@google.com |
Interested in learning about SIGs or starting a new one? Find more information on our website.
Want to get your SIG listed? Please add it to the Community repository.
Ideas, feedback, and submissions are welcome!
Thank you for reading this edition! Let us know if you’d like to see any new information or changes in future community updates by reaching out to product@bazel.build. We look forward to hearing from you.
Thanks,
Google Bazel team