My Thoughts on Monorepo (opens in new tab)

Stopped reading when less than 10 seconds in a sign up pop up covered the article.

The disadvantages are more like "it's not affordable"

``` Monorepos could slow down developers because of slow build times, poor tooling, and merge conflicts.

Most developers still in 2020 struggle to cleanly merge code. Git is slow for projects with large numbers of files and history. There is cognitive overhead involved as developers have to get comfortable with a much larger code base than they would have with multirepo setup.

To do monorepo well require investment in tooling that most organization non-tech leadership will fail to understand ```

Monorepo is clearly more desirable than distributed repo. But it's not a cheap solution.

Well informed article, thank you. In practice I'm pretty happy with a huge monorepo, but have a somewhat surprising problem with it: it makes fine-grained code reuse too easy. People end up adding tons of dependencies, and building anything requires building ten thousand targets at head. (It seems the npm ecosystem ran into the same problem from another angle, they also made fine-grained reuse too easy and ended up with huge dependency trees.) In theory, the solution is using larger libraries with less frequent releases, but then we run into lag and the diamond problem again. I don't know how to square this circle.

Atomic commits are a red herring because deployment isn’t atomic or irreversible. You still have to think about how the system stays healthy while a new build is halfway deployed. A deprecated API still needs to work until you’re certain you will never roll back any consumer and start calling it again.

Having tried both worlds. If a company offers me a job and says they develop in a monorepo I am not going to tell them to f*ck off. I would just ask for twice the salary I would agree to work for in a multirepo company.