Since our last update in December, a lot has been going on at Aspect, and we’re delighted to welcome you back from Summer Vacation! Our kids are going back to school and maybe yours are too. We’re ready to build some great software with Bazel!
Let’s start with some numbers. Our professional services division, Aspect Development, has now worked for 42 companies, where we've remediated a lot of common problems across the Bazel ecosystem. Our blog has 4,600 monthly visitors, and on our documentation site we serve 2,400 of you a month. We plan to make these resources even more useful to the entire Bazel community. To start, we’ve added a live chat box on our docsite so you can ask us questions directly from the documentation. We are also offering one free week of Bazel Open Source Support to help keep your team unblocked.
We’ve seen strong interest in our products as well. Aspect Workflows is the missing ingredient to make Bazel incredibly fast in your current CI/CD platform, on your cloud. We are now installed at 8 companies. Here's an unscripted response when a customer saw that first 4-second build:
In addition to Buildkite, CircleCI, and GitHub Actions, we now support GitLab. And we’ve added a second cloud provider: Google Cloud. This increases the reach of Aspect Workflows, which you can also see from the live demo of Workflows for our open-source repositories: https://buildkite.com/aspect .
Aspect continues to lead the way in Bazel’s Open Source community. Thanks to funding from the Bazel Rules Authors SIG and the Distroless team at Google, we launched a better alternative to the unmaintained bazelbuild/rules_docker repo. We released a 1.0 version of rules_oci in May. There are more details and a meetup talk on our rules_oci blog post. Testimonials from users are now rolling in, and the feedback has been even more positive than we hoped! In the rules_js ecosystem, we reached a 1.0 release for rollup, terser, jasmine, and swc. We continue to get strong user testimonials for rules_js as well.
A huge thank you to these financial sponsors of our Open Source projects:
Aspect CLI is a better frontend for running bazel in your terminal. The “configure” command now generates BUILD files for JavaScript/TypeScript and has preliminary support for Kotlin.You can see real-life usage in Sourcegraph’s repo https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph - try cloning the repo and run "bazel configure".
That's it for now! We’re looking forward to the fall conference season, where you can come meet us at the DPE Summit in San Francisco Sep 20-21, BazelCon in Munich Oct 24-25, and PackagingCon in Berlin Oct 26-28.