---
title: "Build better software to build software better"
url: https://daily.dev/posts/build-better-software-to-build-software-better-kopbq9xdt
source_url: https://slack.engineering/build-better-software-to-build-software-better/
type: article
source: "Slack engineering"
published: 2025-11-06T16:01:36.191Z
updated: 2025-11-06T16:02:01.667Z
tags: ["devops", "performance", "architecture", "bazel", "build-systems"]
reading_time: 18
upvotes: 67
comments: 3
language: en
---

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# Build better software to build software better

**[Slack engineering](https://daily.dev/sources/slack)** · 18 min read · 67 upvotes · 3 comments

## Summary

Slack's engineering team reduced their build pipeline time from 60 minutes to as little as 10 minutes by applying software engineering principles to their build system. They migrated to Bazel while addressing fundamental architectural issues: breaking circular dependencies between frontend and backend code, separating build logic from application code, and creating granular, cacheable build units. The key insight was treating build performance like code performance—optimizing through caching and parallelization while maintaining hermetic, idempotent build steps. This required months of refactoring to properly separate concerns across Python backend, TypeScript frontend, and build orchestration layers.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://slack.engineering/build-better-software-to-build-software-better/>

## Community discussion

Top comments from developers on daily.dev.

**@nttan31081994** · 1 upvotes

> Sure

**@ezpie** · 1 upvotes

> though this irrelevant I'll still say it cause I can
>
> slack is the worst

**@a\_meb\_a** · 0 upvotes

> agree

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---

Tags: [#devops](https://daily.dev/tags/devops), [#performance](https://daily.dev/tags/performance), [#architecture](https://daily.dev/tags/architecture), [#bazel](https://daily.dev/tags/bazel), [#build-systems](https://daily.dev/tags/build-systems)

[View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/build-better-software-to-build-software-better-kopbq9xdt)