Bazel Keith and the Quest for Better Builds

In this episode of Beyond the Noise, Matt Klein sits down with Keith Smiley, aka “Bazel Keith,” to talk all things Bazel and iOS tooling. Keith shares how hacking on Objective-C in high school, contributing to CocoaPods in college, and joining Lyft as an early mobile engineer all stacked up to push him toward dev experience and infrastructure. Along the way, you’ll hear war stories about compiler bugs, massive Swift codebases, and what it actually took to get Bazel’s Apple rules into production shape at Lyft.Keith and Matt also discuss his current work at Modular, where he’s applying the same principles to a very different stack: C++, GPUs, a new language (Mojo), and Python interop, all held together by Bazel. He and Matt get candid about why build systems still feel so hostile to end users, why Apple and Google don’t solve large-team DX problems out of the box, and how remote caching, open source funding, and newcomers like Buck2 might reshape the next decade of builds.

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