Can something as low level as your build tool really be strategic rather than an obvious technical choice driven by whatever language your developers code in?
Building code is something almost every developer deals with, that’s such a notorious time sink there’s an xkcd cartoon about it. At best it’s an interruption, at worst it’s an integration nightmare.
Google, struggling to stay on top of large amounts of code from tens of thousands of coders in half a dozen languages from C++ to Haskell and LISP, spent years creating a build system that promised to be both fast and correct by scaling out reproducible, deterministic builds that use strict dependency management to rebuild only what’s needed.
That’s good for developer productivity, especially in large, fast-moving codebases. It’s not just about getting back to work more quickly, but staying in flow: you’re more likely to remember what you were doing if the build only takes a couple of minutes. If you’re hosting your build system in the cloud, faster builds mean a lower compute bill too.
