| I don't agree with the author that the quality of the team is what determines if a mono-repo is appropriate or not. It doesn't really matter if you use a mono-repo or not, what matters is what individual engineers are empowered to do. If engineers or even team-leads don't have permission to create a repo themselves well then you're probably going to see benefits from a monorepo. At the same time if you have say a ~100 people sharing a repo then you have to make sure that you have tooling that allows each team to customize their building and test environments themselves, which is hard because many CI solutions assume that One Repo = One Build status. Implicit in the author's reasoning is the principle that good engineers don't make mistakes; they don't break the build, not ever. But of course they do, everyone does, and if you have a hundred developers builds will be broken and people's productivity ruined. Perhaps because we're an industry so prone to failure we keep looking for that one solution, that given a good team makes all problems go away. Agile, XP, Monorepos, Containers, Microservices: we tell ourselves will solve our problems and get those pesky business people off our backs for good. But they won't and never will. What really matters is enablement, how can we get our code into production doing what it was intended to do without having your toes stepped on all the time. If you design your processes and tooling around enablement not the cargo-cult flavour of the month buzzword invented in the modern beautifully architected, yet completely open office spaces of one of the FAANG companies, then maybe then you can get some actual results. |
They don't, ever, because the VCS refuses a push if it breaks the build.
That's the problem with all those single-repo discussions. It works perfectly well if you have all the tooling that makes a single repo work like a multi-repo.
And it's great because you can enforce behind the scenes that everything is coherent... Except that you can enforce the same thing on a multi-repo if you write the equivalent tooling. All the points are completely moot, except the one that if you don't have a ton of tooling, a single-repo won't work at all, while a multi-repo will just be not great.