Web application developers have high standards in developer experience including fast build and test times, short feedback cycles, and easy dependency management. Using Bazel to deliver an intuitive web development workflow that meets these expectations involves solving numerous challenges.

This talk shares our experience using Bazel’s NodeJS toolchain and the various Aspect.build’s rules repositories to accelerate the development and maintenance of our 40+ web applications across Aurora. We will show how we used Bazel's JSON Trace Profiling to find performance improvement opportunities that helped us reduce our application build times by 50% and test execution times by 70%. We will share how we combined Vite and iBazel to enable hot module replacement and achieve fast iteration loops, and used Gazelle and PNPM to simplify the management of NPM dependencies across our Bazel monorepo.