System design

5 Years Ago: A Mid-Level Engineer’s Shock Upon Inheriting a Monorepo "Anchor"... Powered by Bazel

Five years ago, I was a mid-level engineer comfortably settled in my tidy, little world of simple repositories. Out of nowhere, the outbound team handed over a massive "anchor" of a Monorepo—powered entirely by Bazel. That initial culture shock, triggered by a tangled web of configuration files, completely shattered my worldview. Yet, looking back, it was the exact trial by fire that transformed me from a local "code-writer" into a true systems engineer. Let’s flip back through the pages of my tech diary to revisit this grueling yet invaluable experience.