| Also an ex-Googler. At a tiny startup of 4 engineers atm. Briefly looked into Bazel, but settled on pantsbuild since Google seems to have just thrown all the language support over the wall to the community. Being able to trivially setup CI on Github has been very helpful and important to me. Being able to easily add targets and package things that require multiple microservices has been nice. People say you can use the native tooling, but what even is the native tooling for python? It doesn't have a standardized packaging tool unless you count docker. pants' support for pex was important for me until we eventually adopted containers. Folks can (and did) get the native packaging wrong, particularly when they were not super familiar with the language they needed to pick up on the fly. Having to deal with an abstraction layer over the tooling has introduced some of its own headaches (eg for docker), but mostly for advanced features. In the end, I'm pretty happy, I see it as an investment in CI, and the CI has caught a bunch of real bugs people pushed. I think starting early here has been good, since the lift to get onto it has been small. |