Blog System/5

You are holding BUILD files wrong

BUILD files are the best tool to represent software architecture; let's see why

Sep 26 • 

Julio Merino

2

1

Bazel and glibc versions

Analyzing how glibc and action non-determinism can lead to surprising failures

Sep 19 • 

Julio Merino

4

Trusting builds with Bazel remote execution

Understanding how the architecture of a remote build system for Bazel helps implement verifiable action execution and end-to-end builds

Sep 12 • 

Julio Merino

4

Understanding Bazel remote caching

A deep dive into the Action Cache, the CAS, and the security issues that arise from using Bazel with a remote cache but without remote execution

Sep 5 • 

Julio Merino

11

5

July 2025

Bazel and action (non-) determinism

A key feature of Bazel is its ability to produce fast, reliable builds by caching the output of actions.

Jul 21 • 

Julio Merino

12

June 2025

Lessons along the EndBOX journey

How a wild side-quest became the source of many of the articles you’ve read—and have come to expect—in this publication

Jun 17 • 

Julio Merino

3

Whatever happened to sandboxfs?

Back in 2017–2020, while I was on the Blaze team at Google, I took on a 20% project that turned into a bit of an obsession: sandboxfs. Born out of my…

Jun 11 • 

Julio Merino

10

2

May 2025

Beginning 3D printing

A brief introduction to 3D printing, following the same steps I have taken over the last two weeks as a complete beginner.

May 28 • 

Julio Merino

6

4

March 2025

The next generation of Bazel builds

Today marks the 10th anniversary of Bazel’s public announcement so this is the perfect moment to reflect on what the next generation of build systems in…

Mar 24 • 

Julio Merino

22

Bazel at Snowflake two years in

Two and a half years ago, I joined Snowflake to help their mission of migrating to Bazel. Here are the articles we have published so far.

Mar 15 • 

Julio Merino

6

Hardware discovery: ACPI & Device Tree

An overview of how a Unix-like BSD kernel performs hardware discovery on x86 and ARM to bind device drivers to hardware devices

Mar 1 • 

Julio Merino

16

2

February 2025

ioctls from Rust

Diving into what the ioctl system call is and how to invoke it from Rust

Feb 13 • 

Julio Merino

14