Monorepos have gotten an more and more well-liked option to handle supply code, however they require a barely completely different toolset. Google developed its personal inside construct and take a look at software 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 purpose to make the software a bit simpler to make use of.
Additionally amongst them is Side, which was co-founded by CEO Alex Eagle and CTO Greg Magolan, who each beforehand labored on Bazel, Angular and adjoining initiatives at Google. COO Jenny Magolan and CXO Eva Howe, who’ve a advertising and authorized background, respectively, are additionally cofounders. The corporate at present 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 Side.
Whereas Bazel is extraordinarily highly effective, it’s arduous to make use of. In some ways, its origins as an inside Google software nonetheless present. “Google has this reputation of: ‘we hire the smartest engineers, and therefore we can throw the most complicated tools at them,” Eagle mentioned half-jokingly. Like different startups on this ecosystem, Side goals to enhance the developer expertise on high of Bazel.
However that’s not the one differentiator for the corporate, Eagle instructed me. That’s on high of all the different advantages that Bazel provides like its caching system that helps convey down compute prices in the course of the steady integration course of and help for multi-language repositories.
“We’re very open source as part of our culture, which I think is a big contrast with EngFlow, that seems like they’re more top-down, convincing management about the tool and engineers are sort of forced to follow along,” Eagle mentioned when requested him how Side suits into the broader Bazel ecosystem. “We’re very much working directly with engineers. We spend a lot of time building the open source foundations that led a lot of our customers to find us.”
He additionally pressured that the workforce authored main components of the Bazel tooling that folks use, however extra importantly, he mentioned, Side goals to resolve all the developer productiveness story. In Eagle’s view, it’s not simply in regards to the interior and outer loop of improvement — that’s, the native improvement 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 think there’s even an outer outer loop, which is like standing up a new project. And this is when people talk about monorepo, they say, ‘Oh, the first thing I do with a new project, do I make a new repository?’”
All of this implies Side’s total mission is extra formidable and goes past utilizing Bazel to make their construct and take a look at processes run quicker. “There’s so many moving pieces that development teams are forced to make a lot of choices — and those choices interact with each other and it’s really hard to make something coherent that’s productive and consistent across an entire organization. With a large number of software teams, you don’t want all of them to pick something different, because then you have no economy of scale.”
Side 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 moving to a multi-language reality for decades, and it’s created an abundance of productivity bottlenecks: delayed releases, broken builds and a lack of organization,” mentioned FirstMark Principal David Waltcher. “I’ve known Alex and Greg for many years – they are world-class engineers and their contributions to Bazel and the ecosystem are immense. We see the potential in Aspect to build the de facto platform for unlocking scalable, multi-language repos.”
