The Hidden Cost of Waiting: Build Time as a Productivity Killer
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Swiggy's engineering team reduced build times by up to 80% across multiple repositories through systematic optimization. Key strategies included using tar archives instead of direct file copies to Docker, migrating from npm to Yarn workspaces, parallelizing builds, removing redundant package builds in monorepos, separating SDK publishing into parallel pipelines, and aggressively pruning Git tags (from 300,000 to 1,000) and branches. These changes saved approximately 140 developer hours per week across three major repositories while eliminating build failures caused by race conditions.
Table of contents
ProblemSteps takenDoing a tar copy of node_modules to Docker instead of a direct copyMigration to yarn and yarn workspacesDoing yarn install in the final dist folder instead of copying from the build.Lerna workspace, removing individual builds of packagesRemoving publish and running publish for SDK on a separate threadParallelizing buildsUsing an alias for build names across environmentsGet Ashoka Chandra Wardhan’s stories in your inboxDeletion of git tags and branchesThe three-legged journeyRepo SEORepo discoveryRepo CheckoutFinal Output 📈📈📈Closing ThoughtsSort: