Blog | Laurent Le Brun's blog

Evolving a codebase at Google Scale

I’ve spent over a decade working on developer infrastructure at Google, contributing to areas like the build system, IDE, refactoring tools, and linters. Contributing to the evolution of one of the world’s largest codebases was a challenging task. What might seem like a tiny change can ripple across...

My Adventures with Narrative Engines

I've always loved games with compelling stories. From the classic LucasArts point & click adventures to modern gems like The Forgotten City, Disco Elysium, Pentiment, and Telltale games, many titles have inspired me.

While working on my latest project, I wondered: how would I implement a story,...

The Story of Reformatting 100k Files at Google in 2012

A Mysterious Meeting

Back in September 2012, I was a junior engineer at Google, working on Bazel (Google’s build tool, also known internally as Blaze). One day, a mysterious calendar invite landed in my inbox. It was sent by two engineers in the US, and I was invited along with my team lead.

I...

Crafting Art in 8kB - 'The Sheep and the Flower'

Last month, I published an article about a demoscene production that I released last year. The article starts with:

In November 2022, we set ourselves a challenge: make a real-time animation that looks like a standard short animated movie, with the constraint that it should fit in 8 kilobytes. T...

An Overview of the Starlark language

Starlark is a small programming language, designed as a simple dialect of Python and intended primarily for embedded use in applications. Some people might say it’s a bit like Lua with Python syntax, but I think there are many interesting bits to discuss. The language is now open-source and used in...