We manage the build pipeline that delivers Quip and Slack Canvas’s backend. A year ago, we were chasing exciting ideas to help engineers ship better code, faster. But we had one huge problem: builds took 60 minutes. With a build that slow, the whole pipeline gets less agile, and feedback doesn’t come to engineers until…

The Slack Blog serves as a resource for teams and developers looking to make the most out of Slack, a popular collaboration platform. The blog covers a wide range of topics related to Slack usage, including tips and tricks for effective communication, productivity hacks, and best practices for managing teams and projects. Developers can learn how to leverage Slack's API and integrations to automate workflows, build custom bots, and enhance team collaboration. With insights from industry experts and real-world use cases, the Slack Blog provides resources to help developers unlock the full potential of Slack for their projects and teams.

Slack engineering

Slack's engineering team reduced their build pipeline time from 60 minutes to as little as 10 minutes by applying software engineering principles to their build system. They migrated to Bazel while addressing fundamental architectural issues: breaking circular dependencies between frontend and backend code, separating build logic from application code, and creating granular, cacheable build units. The key insight was treating build performance like code performance—optimizing through caching and parallelization while maintaining hermetic, idempotent build steps. This required months of refactoring to properly separate concerns across Python backend, TypeScript frontend, and build orchestration layers.

Build better software to build software better

Thinking About Build (and Code) Performance

<p>though this irrelevant I’ll still say it cause I can</p>
<p>slack is the worst</p>
