March 2025 Summaries

Siggi Simonarson, Co-founder @ BuildBuddy, is welcoming Dan Stowell to the engineering team at BuildBuddy. Dan joins from Vercel where he was Director of Engineering and previously held roles at Replit as Head of Engineering and Spotify as a Principal Engineer. With his experience leading and scaling developer tools companies, Dan will help achieve BuildBuddy's mission of bringing top developer tools to every company. BuildBuddy looks forward to working alongside Dan to build the future of developer tools.

We discovered a bug in Bazel's `--remote_download_minimal` flag that was causing builds with this flag to download all output artifacts, leading to excessive data downloads and disk space issues. A fix has been submitted upstream and will be included in the upcoming Bazel 9.x release, as well as cherry-picked back to versions 8.2.0 and 7.6.0. Users on older versions of Bazel can work around this issue by setting `--experimental_remote_cache_ttl` to a large value, such as `10000d`, but this may lead to issues with the local blob metadata becoming out of sync with the Remote Cache. The bug was discovered through an investigation into unexpected downloads and was found to be caused by Bazel's logic for validating blob metadata and its reliance on the `--experimental_remote_cache_ttl` flag. A workaround has been implemented, which involves setting a long TTL value to effectively disable the TTL feature, but this may lead to issues with data evictions from the Remote Cache. The fix has been submitted upstream and will be included in future Bazel releases.