Monorepos have gotten an more and more common technique to handle supply code, however they require a barely completely different toolset. Google developed its personal inner construct and check 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 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 marketing and authorized background, respectively, are additionally cofounders. The corporate as we speak introduced a $3 million seed led by FirstMark Capital. That’s along with a $850,000 family and friends around the crew raised earlier to bootstrap the event of Facet.
Whereas Bazel is extraordinarily highly effective, it’s exhausting to make use of. In some ways, its origins as an inner 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 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 provides like its caching system that helps deliver down compute prices in the course of the steady integration course of and assist 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 stated when requested him how Facet matches 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 burdened that the crew authored main components of the Bazel tooling that folks use, however extra importantly, he stated, Facet goals to resolve your entire developer productiveness story. In Eagle’s view, it’s not simply concerning the internal 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 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 Facet’s general mission is extra formidable and goes past utilizing Bazel to make their construct and check 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.”
Facet has already signed up clients like Airtable, Coda, and Sourcegraph. Eagle tells me that the corporate has signed up about 20 enterprises to this point.
“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,” stated 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.”
