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by Joe8Bit 1557 days ago
I like the blog post and broadly agree with the conclusions, but I want to double down on something in the article:

> Shared pain

I've worked in some orgs with very large monorepos (1000s of developers working in a single repo) and broadly have had positive experiences with them, but this 'shared pain' was by FAR the biggest drawback I experienced. When things went wrong with the monorepos they tended to go VERY wrong and effect EVERYONE. Multiple incidents of the monorepo just crushing productivity for 1000 person engineering orgs, for a period of time.

That's not to say I think monorepos are bad, it's 100% context dependent whether they make sense for your org in my experience, but I learned that the same tradeoffs you get with architectural monoliths/distributed systems often apply to multi/mono repos as well.

1 comments

Same experience. It's interesting because we've had great success on our internal design lib's monorepo compared to the overall application. Which makes sense in some regards.
The fact that you split your design lib from your "overall application" suggests that what you are describing is not, in fact, a monorepo pattern :)
There's a split between our orgs. DocuSign runs a mono repo. But the big product I work on has its own giant mono repo. Design lib is another giant mono repo comprising general front end things also.