Video: Monorepos & Spaceships – Navigating Successfully Through Code and Cosmos

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Building a monorepo is like flying a spaceship: many people work together to make sure things don't go up in flames.
In this talk we'll go over tools, techniques and best practices to help us put out fires and stay on course throughout our intergalactic journey.

Disclaimer: attending this talk probably doesn't qualify you to fly spaceships! 

This talk has been presented at JSNation US 2024, check out the latest edition of this JavaScript Conference.

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Video summary
Hello everyone. I'd like to start off by telling you a story about a guy named Dan. He's a mechanic and his job is fixing spaceships. Dan is a metaphor for all of us developers. Let's talk about monorepos as you've probably guessed from the title. I'll start off by talking about polyrepos, what they do well, but also where they fall short. Then I'll talk about monorepos and what issues they solve, as well as why you need good monorepo tooling, especially at scale. A Monorepo is a single repository containing multiple distinct projects with well-defined relationships. It allows teams to work together in a unified manner. Monorepos help with velocity, safety, and mobility. Monorepos can be adopted incrementally and good tooling can help with running tests. CI time is now coupled to the size of the change made, rather than the size of the monorepo. By generating a task graph from the project graph, we can optimize the build process by parallelizing and scheduling tasks. NX offers a solution by distributing tasks across multiple agents, allowing for time and cost optimization. Visit monorepo.tools or nx.dev to learn more and achieve focus and contentment like Dan.

FAQ

Yes, monorepos can be adopted incrementally by grouping projects that make sense together, allowing for flexibility in organizing code.

Dan is a metaphorical character representing developers. He is described as a mechanic who fixes spaceships, symbolizing the tasks and challenges faced by developers.

The main topic of the talk is about monorepos, their benefits, and how they compare to polyrepos in software development.

Challenges include inefficient code sharing, high code duplication, complex dependency management, and isolation, which can harm collaboration.

A monorepo is a single repository containing multiple distinct projects with well-defined relationships, allowing for easier code sharing and collaboration.

Monorepos offer benefits such as atomic changes, reduced code duplication, consistent tooling, and improved velocity, safety, and mobility in development.

Monorepos allow changes to be made across multiple projects with a single PR, reducing overhead and encouraging code sharing by simplifying the process.

Yes, teams can still have autonomy over their code, tools, and deployment within a monorepo, but a basic level of collaboration and agreement on certain tools is needed.

NX provides tools for analyzing project dependencies, caching computations, and distributing tasks across agents to optimize CI processes and improve efficiency.

Polyrepos refer to a structure where each team or project has its own repository. Advantages include team autonomy, technological freedom, and a cleanly separated architecture.

Max Kless
Max Kless
28 min
21 Nov, 2024

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