Happy Holidays from Aspect: Winter 2022

Aspect has had a busy year, consulting for over 20 companies and observing common challenges in DevInfra approaches to Bazel, while sharing insights on their blog with 4,200 monthly views. They operate a popular documentation site for Bazel rules with over 2,000 monthly active users, serving a community of 600 companies and 50,000 engineers. Aspect has transitioned from offering hourly consulting to a turn-key, infrastructure-as-code product, addressing common CI challenges like keeping build agents warm and avoiding cache misses. At Bazelcon in November, they announced the Alpha release of Aspect Workflows, which significantly reduced CI times for their first customer. Their Aspect CLI, now at version 1.0, is an open-source Bazel wrapper with a gRPC-based plugin API, enhancing usability and workflow integration. They also launched rules_js, a new plugin for Bazel, and have been migrating client codebases to this solution. Aspect offers professional services, including expertise with Bazel 6.0.0 and Bzlmod, the new Bazel module manager, promising to alleviate the maintenance burden of the WORKSPACE file. Looking ahead to 2023, they anticipate increased Bazel adoption and improved developer productivity.