Monorepos have gotten an more and more standard technique to handle supply code, however they require a barely totally different toolset. Google developed its personal inner construct and check instrument on high of its monorepo after which, in 2015, open sourced it as Bazel. 9 years on, there’s a thriving ecosystem of Bazel-adjacent startups like NX and EngFlow that goal to make the instrument a bit simpler to make use of.
Additionally amongst them is Facet, which was co-founded by CEO Alex Eagle and CTO Greg Magolan, who each beforehand labored on Bazel, Angular and adjoining tasks at Google. COO Jenny Magolan and CXO Eva Howe, who’ve a advertising and authorized background, respectively, are additionally cofounders. The corporate right this moment introduced a $3 million seed led by FirstMark Capital. That’s along with a $850,000 family and friends around the workforce raised earlier to bootstrap the event of Facet.
Whereas Bazel is extraordinarily highly effective, it’s laborious to make use of. In some ways, its origins as an inner Google instrument nonetheless present. “Google has this popularity of: ‘we rent the neatest engineers, and subsequently we are able to throw essentially the most difficult instruments at them,” Eagle stated half-jokingly. Like different startups on this ecosystem, Facet goals to enhance the developer expertise on high of Bazel.
However that’s not the one differentiator for the corporate, Eagle advised me. That’s on high of the entire different advantages that Bazel gives like its caching system that helps convey down compute prices in the course of the steady integration course of and assist for multi-language repositories.
“We’re very open supply as a part of our tradition, which I believe is an enormous distinction with EngFlow, that looks like they’re extra top-down, convincing administration concerning the instrument and engineers are kind of pressured to observe alongside,” Eagle stated when requested him how Facet matches into the broader Bazel ecosystem. “We’re very a lot working immediately with engineers. We spend quite a lot of time constructing the open supply foundations that led quite a lot of our prospects to search out us.”
He additionally burdened that the workforce authored main components of the Bazel tooling that individuals use, however extra importantly, he stated, Facet goals to unravel your entire developer productiveness story. In Eagle’s view, it’s not simply concerning the inside and outer loop of growth — that’s, the native growth workflow after which the remainder of the event course of as soon as that code will get checked right into a model management system. “I believe there’s even an outer outer loop, which is like standing up a brand new challenge. And that is when individuals speak about monorepo, they are saying, ‘Oh, the very first thing I do with a brand new challenge, do I make a brand new repository?’”
All of this implies Facet’s total mission is extra bold and goes past utilizing Bazel to make their construct and check processes run sooner. “There’s so many shifting items that growth groups are pressured to make quite a lot of decisions — and people decisions work together with one another and it’s actually laborious to make one thing coherent that’s productive and constant throughout a whole group. With a lot of software program groups, you don’t need all of them to select one thing totally different, as a result of then you haven’t any economic system of scale.”
Facet has already signed up prospects like Airtable, Coda, and Sourcegraph. Eagle tells me that the corporate has signed up about 20 enterprises thus far.
“Engineering organizations have been shifting to a multi-language actuality for many years, and it’s created an abundance of productiveness bottlenecks: delayed releases, damaged builds and a scarcity of group,” stated FirstMark Principal David Waltcher. “I’ve identified Alex and Greg for a few years – they’re world-class engineers and their contributions to Bazel and the ecosystem are immense. We see the potential in Facet to construct the de facto platform for unlocking scalable, multi-language repos.”