[gratitoad]

First off, I appreciate the thoughtful write-up, under different circumstances this is the direction I’d probably be heading. However our web Frontend code is all currently in a large-ish (500 packages, 100 apps) monorepo and we’re actively pursuing breaking that up into a hybrid repo model, largely in the interest of true team autonomy. We want our code organization to better reflect our Eng org structure and to establish much stronger lines of ownership and responsibility. Obviously we see other compelling reasons to take this big step, but there’s also a lot of risk involved, particularly around dependency management and figuring out how to accomplish eventual UI consistency across our web apps, all of which will use a large number of shared libraries/components that will be broadly organized into a handful of repos (likely monorepos) representing domains and owned by different teams. The intent is for this evolution to culminate in a microfrontends architecture as a way to support collaboration across autonomous teams without the need for built-time coupling.

[DanielHB]

Fair enough, probably far bigger scale than I am used to. But I wonder why move away from a monorepo? Publishing and versioning common packages is a huge pain in the ass, especially for JS projects where you need transpiling, sourcemaps, etc.

Some smart branch management so teams can work independently seems better for me. For example each project gets their own production branch and development branches to trigger deployments and can pull changes from master as they see fit.

If you are planning on these shared components and dependencies be versioned I highly advise against that, the permutation of versions of underlying common libraries (like React) can make an incompatible versioning hell where component X works on React ^16.0.0 but in practice was tested in React ^18.0.0 only. In my own project I explicitly force all shared dependencies (which I try to keep to a minimum) to be on the same version.

> without the need for built-time coupling

There are two ways of having build-time coupling:

1) Shared build/bundling code, configuration and tools

2) Single build/bundling for all the code

You can most definitely have independent projects sharing the same build/bundling code, configuration and tools while every project is built separately and independently. This can make it hard to integrate with solutions that rely on taking over your bundling though.