Erik Kerber

Mobile @ Slack

Erik works on builds, tools, and developer experience at Slack. A longtime Apple platform developer, Erik has recently been working with Bazel to build amazing tools and workflows for Apple and Android teams alike.

Breaking the Build: Lessons from the Frontlines of Android Tooling

As Android development teams grow in complexity, so do their build systems — and the decisions around how to scale them. This panel brings together engineers who’ve migrated (or decided not) to new systems like Bazel, navigated polyglot codebases, and built resilient tooling strategies under real-world constraints. Topics We’ll Explore: * The trade-offs of migrating to Bazel, Buck, or other modern build systems — and why some teams chose not to. * Hidden costs, cultural impacts, and technical debt from tooling transitions. * Strategies for managing cross-platform builds in Kotlin Multiplatform and polyglot environments. * Balancing build performance with developer experience in large-scale codebases. * If we had to do it all over again: lessons learned from build system overhauls.