Fantastic build speeds & where to find them in software dvelopment

A software engineer recounts a career-long focus on improving developer productivity through faster, more reliable build systems, beginning with parallelizing Android unit tests at Lookout and reducing CI time from nearly an hour to 15 minutes. At Uber, the author addressed limitations in Android’s Gradle tooling, helped migrate Android projects to Buck and a monorepo, and created OkBuck to simplify the transition while emphasizing usability alongside performance. Broader migrations across Uber consolidated hundreds of repositories into platform-specific monorepos, supported by automation for preserving history, updating build configurations, and resolving dependencies, as well as systems for incremental CI, merge queues, flaky-test management, remote environments, and automated code-quality improvements. These efforts improved developer sentiment, enabled company-wide changes such as a rapid Log4j upgrade, and reinforced lessons about parallelism, caching, observability, automated migration tooling, incremental CI/CD, and managing test flakiness. The author concludes by introducing Gitar, a new effort with colleagues to provide a unified developer experience as a service.

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