Costs exposed: Monorepo vs. multirepo - Julio Merino (jmmv.dev)

I’ve never used a large monorepo myself, but they do seem to be the way to go.

• Web site excerpt: In software engineering organizations, there are certain practices that keep costs under control even if those seem more expensive at first. Unfortunately, because such practices feel more expensive, teams choose to keep their status quo even when they know it is suboptimal. This choice ends up hurting productivity and morale because planned work is continuously interrupted, which in turn drags project completion. The reason I say seem and not are is because the alternatives to these cost-exposing practices also suffer from costs. The difference is that, while the former surface costs, leading to the need to allocate time and people to infrastructure work, the latter keeps the costs smeared over teams and individuals in ways that are difficult to account and plan for. To illustrate what I’m trying to say, I’ll present three different scenarios in which this opinion applies. All of these case studies come from past personal experiences while working in different teams and projects. The first one covered in this post is about the adoption of a monorepo vs. the use of multiple different repositories. The other two will come in follow-up articles.

• Link to site: Costs exposed: Monorepo vs. multirepo - Julio Merino (jmmv.dev)