Andrew Stout

As your robotics software development organization scales, the developer experience grows both more important and harder to get right–and an inefficient build system can cost you in slow iteration cycles, developer frustration, and wasted resources. We will share insights from the Robotics and AI Institute’s DevExp and build system overhaul: a project with a scope spanning from repository organization (mono-repo or multi-repo?) to polyglot build systems with caching and remote build execution, ROS integration, management of (conflicting!) dependencies, all the way to runtime tools, deployment, and migration–for an organization consisting of many different robotics research and engineering teams with diverse needs. We’ll discuss our process, the choices we made and why, as well as other options we considered, bespoke tools we had to build, and retrospective lessons and future plans. Come to learn how we’re saving 164 CPU-hours per day, how we make Bazel and ROS work together, or how close we came to total failure before delighting users.