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It really paints a picture of the authors credentials to be making this declaration. All signs for the rest of the world point to the opposite conclusion: unle

It really paints a picture of the authors credentials to be making this declaration. All signs for the rest of the world point to the opposite conclusion: unless you're Google-scale, you don't have Google level resources. Google has more engineers working on developer experience than most companies will ever have period. And monorepos work best when workflows are carefully thought out with clever application specific tooling. - I think the author is probably working on a 1-10 developer project (and I'm leaning towards 1) and has confused the convenience with having things in reach when the entire system fits in your mind with the general benefits of a monorepo. I also wonder if they read any of the letters they linked too...

dastbe 4y ago
> All signs for the rest of the world point to the opposite conclusion: unless you're Google-scale, you don't have Google level resources. Google has more engineers working on developer experience than most companies will ever have period. I feel like this was true ~5 years ago, but these days the tooling around scaling monorepos is safely supporting O(100) developers without a lot of overhead. > And monorepos work best when workflows are carefully thought out with clever application specific tooling. I don't see any meaningful distinction with how well thought out workflows need to be between mono and polyrepo.
- BoorishBears 4y ago
  > I don't see any meaningful distinction with how well thought out workflows need to be between mono and polyrepo. You completely failed to parse the sentence. The point being made isn't "well thought workflows are only for monorepos", that applies to the "needing clever application specific tooling" part. Vendoring/Versioning for discrete packages is a heavily invested in problem space for most tech stacks you'll come across. But if you build a monorepo and don't end up with a build system that takes on those responsibilities you end something that doesn't scale to even moderately large interconnected components. OP has such a tiny project that I'm not convinced they're even dealing with dependencies in a traditional sense. But well before you get to Google scale, you'll run into situations where you just want to change one thing and don't want to change every single downstream dependency which normally would have been isolated via a discrete package that doesn't have to change in lockstep. And then that exact same pain starts to exist for deployments and needs to be worked around. > I feel like this was true ~5 years ago, but these days the tooling around scaling monorepos is safely supporting O(100) developers without a lot of overhead. Nothing about the above has changed in the last 5 years, it's kind of the ground truth of monorepos via multiple repos: You're the first person I've ever seen imply monorepos don't offload complexity to tooling, even amongst proponents.
  - dastbe 4y ago
    > Vendoring/Versioning for discrete packages is a heavily invested in problem space for most tech stacks you'll come across. 100% disagree. The problem of "How do I define my dependencies and have a package manager reify that into a concrete set of versioned dependencies" may be a solved problem, but the tools for tracking dependencies across many repos and driving upgrades is neolithic. About the only company I've seen that does this well is Amazon, and they have yet to sell us version sets as a service. > OP has such a tiny project that I'm not convinced they're even dealing with dependencies in a traditional sense. But well before you get to Google scale, you'll run into situations where you just want to change one thing and don't want to change every single downstream dependency which normally would have been isolated via a discrete package that doesn't have to change in lockstep. And then that exact same pain starts to exist for deployments and needs to be worked around. As I alluded to above, the dual of this is that getting everyone to update their dependencies is orders of magnitude more difficult when you have a polyrepo setup, even if we're working under the ideal situation where repo setup is standardize to such a degree that a person can parachute into a repo and become effective within minutes. > Nothing about the above has changed in the last 5 years, it's kind of the ground truth of monorepos via multiple repos: You're the first person I've ever seen imply monorepos don't offload complexity to tooling, even amongst proponents. Both polyrepo and monorepo have complexity in scaling that is handled by their tooling. The difference historically is that OSS polyrepo tooling has been better and better integrated because that's just how most things are built in any language, but that has been improving over the past ~half decade * Bazel maintenance complexity has dropped precipitously, and many of the initial bottlenecks you hit with it have been solved in OSS. * If you're anti-bazel, gradle and cargo monorepo support is decently good. I believe the same is true in js these days, but I don't have hands-on experience * Services for managing monorepos like sourcegraph for codesearch or mergify for submit queue now exist that make it easy to adopt the patterns that work well at large companies. * Microsoft and others have invested in git to improve scalability of developing against large repos. * you have OSS tools like git-branchless that further improve the experience of working in a monorepo There are a bunch of companies in the O(100) - O(1000) developer range that are using this stuff and it works very well.
  - tylerhou 4y ago
    > But well before you get to Google scale, ... doesn't have to change in lockstep. Not updating dependencies is the equivalent of never brushing your teeth. Yes, you can ship code faster in the short term, but version skew will be a huge pain in the future. A little maintenance every day is preferable to ten root canals in a few years.

dastbe 4y ago

> All signs for the rest of the world point to the opposite conclusion: unless you're Google-scale, you don't have Google level resources. Google has more engineers working on developer experience than most companies will ever have period. I feel like this was true ~5 years ago, but these days the tooling around scaling monorepos is safely supporting O(100) developers without a lot of overhead. > And monorepos work best when workflows are carefully thought out with clever application specific tooling. I don't see any meaningful distinction with how well thought out workflows need to be between mono and polyrepo.

BoorishBears 4y ago
> I don't see any meaningful distinction with how well thought out workflows need to be between mono and polyrepo. You completely failed to parse the sentence. The point being made isn't "well thought workflows are only for monorepos", that applies to the "needing clever application specific tooling" part. Vendoring/Versioning for discrete packages is a heavily invested in problem space for most tech stacks you'll come across. But if you build a monorepo and don't end up with a build system that takes on those responsibilities you end something that doesn't scale to even moderately large interconnected components. OP has such a tiny project that I'm not convinced they're even dealing with dependencies in a traditional sense. But well before you get to Google scale, you'll run into situations where you just want to change one thing and don't want to change every single downstream dependency which normally would have been isolated via a discrete package that doesn't have to change in lockstep. And then that exact same pain starts to exist for deployments and needs to be worked around. > I feel like this was true ~5 years ago, but these days the tooling around scaling monorepos is safely supporting O(100) developers without a lot of overhead. Nothing about the above has changed in the last 5 years, it's kind of the ground truth of monorepos via multiple repos: You're the first person I've ever seen imply monorepos don't offload complexity to tooling, even amongst proponents.
- dastbe 4y ago
  > Vendoring/Versioning for discrete packages is a heavily invested in problem space for most tech stacks you'll come across. 100% disagree. The problem of "How do I define my dependencies and have a package manager reify that into a concrete set of versioned dependencies" may be a solved problem, but the tools for tracking dependencies across many repos and driving upgrades is neolithic. About the only company I've seen that does this well is Amazon, and they have yet to sell us version sets as a service. > OP has such a tiny project that I'm not convinced they're even dealing with dependencies in a traditional sense. But well before you get to Google scale, you'll run into situations where you just want to change one thing and don't want to change every single downstream dependency which normally would have been isolated via a discrete package that doesn't have to change in lockstep. And then that exact same pain starts to exist for deployments and needs to be worked around. As I alluded to above, the dual of this is that getting everyone to update their dependencies is orders of magnitude more difficult when you have a polyrepo setup, even if we're working under the ideal situation where repo setup is standardize to such a degree that a person can parachute into a repo and become effective within minutes. > Nothing about the above has changed in the last 5 years, it's kind of the ground truth of monorepos via multiple repos: You're the first person I've ever seen imply monorepos don't offload complexity to tooling, even amongst proponents. Both polyrepo and monorepo have complexity in scaling that is handled by their tooling. The difference historically is that OSS polyrepo tooling has been better and better integrated because that's just how most things are built in any language, but that has been improving over the past ~half decade * Bazel maintenance complexity has dropped precipitously, and many of the initial bottlenecks you hit with it have been solved in OSS. * If you're anti-bazel, gradle and cargo monorepo support is decently good. I believe the same is true in js these days, but I don't have hands-on experience * Services for managing monorepos like sourcegraph for codesearch or mergify for submit queue now exist that make it easy to adopt the patterns that work well at large companies. * Microsoft and others have invested in git to improve scalability of developing against large repos. * you have OSS tools like git-branchless that further improve the experience of working in a monorepo There are a bunch of companies in the O(100) - O(1000) developer range that are using this stuff and it works very well.
- tylerhou 4y ago
  > But well before you get to Google scale, ... doesn't have to change in lockstep. Not updating dependencies is the equivalent of never brushing your teeth. Yes, you can ship code faster in the short term, but version skew will be a huge pain in the future. A little maintenance every day is preferable to ten root canals in a few years.