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My last 2 jobs have been working on developer productivity for 100+ developer organizations. One is a monorepo, one is not. Neither really seems to result in

My last 2 jobs have been working on developer productivity for 100+ developer organizations. One is a monorepo, one is not. Neither really seems to result in less work, or a better experience. But I've found that your choice just dictates what type of problems you have to solve. Monorepos are going to be mostly challenges around scaling the org in a single repo. Polyrepos are going to be mostly challenges with coordination. But the absolute worst thing to do is not commit to a course of action and have to solve both sets of challenges (eg: having one pretty big repo with 80% of your code, and then the other 20% in a series of smaller repos)

01100011 8y ago
Jesus, this. Look, you're going to run into issues either way, because you're trying to solve a difficult problem. It's like thinking OOP or functional programming is going to solve all your issues... I mean, in some limited cases they could, but realistically you're just smooshing the difficulties around and hopefully moving them to somewhere where you are more able to deal with them. FWIW, I've worked in a many-repo org and it sucked worse than huge companies with monorepos and good tooling, but I'm not going to make some blanket statement because it depends on the specifics of your code/release process/developer familiarity etc.
- brodo 8y ago
  This. Every decision is a trade-off. There is no silver bullet. Context matters.
btschaegg 8y ago
Sounds reasonable. I'll have to add, though, that the underlying technology factors into this as well. For example: If you're stuck with a TFS monorepo (you poor soul), you actually get to deal with both problems to some extent, since TFS doesn't enforce that you check out the intire repository at once. This can have very "funny" situations because someone forgot to checkout new changes in some folder. OTOH, at least for releases, you can remedy this by using CI everywhere.
jeklj 8y ago
I’d argue the scaling challenges are more technical in nature, and therefore easier to tackle than coordination issues. But this seems right to me.

01100011 8y ago

Jesus, this. Look, you're going to run into issues either way, because you're trying to solve a difficult problem. It's like thinking OOP or functional programming is going to solve all your issues... I mean, in some limited cases they could, but realistically you're just smooshing the difficulties around and hopefully moving them to somewhere where you are more able to deal with them. FWIW, I've worked in a many-repo org and it sucked worse than huge companies with monorepos and good tooling, but I'm not going to make some blanket statement because it depends on the specifics of your code/release process/developer familiarity etc.

brodo 8y ago
This. Every decision is a trade-off. There is no silver bullet. Context matters.

btschaegg 8y ago

Sounds reasonable. I'll have to add, though, that the underlying technology factors into this as well. For example: If you're stuck with a TFS monorepo (you poor soul), you actually get to deal with both problems to some extent, since TFS doesn't enforce that you check out the intire repository at once. This can have very "funny" situations because someone forgot to checkout new changes in some folder. OTOH, at least for releases, you can remedy this by using CI everywhere.

jeklj 8y ago

I’d argue the scaling challenges are more technical in nature, and therefore easier to tackle than coordination issues. But this seems right to me.