Building at Google: From Idea to Production
summary
Migrates two 10+ year Fitbit mobile codebases onto Google’s Bazel-derived build system (called basil here), replacing Xcode/Gradle and 200+ custom Python scripts, and cuts builds from ~60–65 minutes to ~10–15 minutes — about an 80% build time reduction. Team splits monoliths into thousands of small libraries (now ~8k iOS and ~12k Android targets), surfaces ~300 runtime bugs during testing, and rolls out with zero production incidents.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:28Project context
- 2:34Migration overview
- 3:55Safe infrastructure migration
- 8:36Three-phase migration strategy
- 13:56Basil migration solution
- 16:41Basil build efficiency
- 23:19Migration results
- 27:10Post-migration benefits
- 28:54Final thoughts
- 29:16Q&A
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