Skip to main content

monorepos

Dan Luu: Advantages of monolithic version control

Simplified organization

With multiple repos, you typically either have one project per repo, or an umbrella of related projects per repo, but that forces you to define what a “project” is for your particular team or company, and it sometimes forces you to split and merge repos for reasons that are pure overhead. For example, having to split a project because it’s too big or has too much history for your VCS is not optimal.

With a monorepo, projects can be organized and grouped together in whatever way you find to be most logically consistent, and not just because your version control system forces you to organize things in a particular way. Using a single repo also reduces overhead from managing dependencies.

A side effect of the simplified organization is that it’s easier to navigate projects. The monorepos I’ve used let you essentially navigate as if everything is on a networked file system, re-using the idiom that’s used to navigate within projects. Multi repo setups usually have two separate levels of navigation – the filesystem idiom that’s used inside projects, and then a meta-level for navigating between projects.

A side effect of that side effect is that, with monorepos, it’s often the case that it’s very easy to get a dev environment set up to run builds and tests. If you expect to be able to navigate between projects with the equivalent of cd, you also expect to be able to do cd; make. Since it seems weird for that to not work, it usually works, and whatever tooling effort is necessary to make it work gets done1. While it’s technically possible to get that kind of ease in multiple repos, it’s not as natural, which means that the necessary work isn’t done as often.

Dan Luu

npm: lerna
Tool for manageing JavaScript projects with multiple packages

While developing Babel I followed a monorepo approach where the entire project was split into individual packages but everything lived in the same repo. This was great. It allowed super easy modularisation which meant the core was easier to approach and meant others could use the useful parts of Babel in their own projects.

This tool was abstracted out of that and deals with bootstrapping packages by linking them together as well as publishing them to npm. You can see the Babel repo for an example of a large Lerna project.

npmjs

Comments

Most Favorite Posts

Server-driven UI (SDUI): Meet Zalandos AppCraft and AirBnB Lona

A short WTF: Joe Birch:  SERVER DRIVEN UI, PART 1: THE CONCEPT Zalando seems to follow the SDUI principle as well - defining a common design language and construct the screens on the backend while displaying them natively on the clients. They even go one step further; they implemented a mighty toolset to enable non-technical stakeholders to define their own native app screens Compass: Web tooling to create screens and bind data Beetroot: Backend service that combines the screen layout definition with the data Lapis/Golem: iOS/Android UI render engines Crazy cool! Good job, guys (when you do an open-source release?) To even move faster a Flutter based UI render engine implementation was great! See also AirBnB Lona SDUI approach Building a Visual Language Why Dropbox sunsetted its universal C++ mobile project and AirBnB its React Native implementation

FF Chartwell: Defining pie chart, bar charts and many others via vector font!

  With FF Chartwell you can define Charts via OpenType font, and transform a string, e.g. " 60+ 30 + 10 " into a Pie Chart 60%-30%-10% including color support (not only b/w!) without rendering anything: directly via font without using any images! Check this out: FontBlog FF Chartwell So great!

Writing High-Performance Swift Code

Enabling Optimizations Whole Module Optimizations (WMO) Reducing Dynamic Dispatch Dynamic Dispatch Advice: Use 'final' when you know the declaration does not need to be overridden Advice: Use 'private' and 'fileprivate' when declaration does not need to be accessed outside of file Advice: If WMO is enabled, use 'internal' when a declaration does not need to be accessed outside of module Using Container Types Efficiently Advice: Use value types in Array Advice: Use ContiguousArray with reference types when NSArray bridging is unnecessary Advice: Use inplace mutation instead of object-reassignment Wrapping operations Advice: Use wrapping integer arithmetic when you can prove that overflow cannot occur Generics Advice: Put generic declarations in the same module where they are used The cost of large Swift values Advice: Use copy-on-write semantics for large values Unsafe code Advice: Use unmanaged references to avoid reference counting overhead Protocols Ad...

Lean prioritization matrix

  We are sorting the stream of stakeholder request and product ideas in a KPI-weighted table. The Matrix This 2x2 matrix low effort vs. high effort high value vs. low value is a nice and easy consumable visualization model. The Weights Suggested weights are Reach How many customers does the feature impact? Customers New/existing target groups Revenue Will it drive revenue either direct or via extended CLV? Acquisition Will the feature help drive new customers? Efficiency Does the feature help drive efficiency in customers’ lives – be that internal customers (colleagues), or external (paying) customers? Brand Does the feature enhance your brand awareness? The classification/quadrants Top left to bottom right Q1 Do it now! Q2 Break it down and put in prio sequence Q3 Gap filler Q4 Forget about it... for now. Andy Wicks - Mind the product

iOS In-App Browser JavaScript injections to spy on user behaviour on 3rd party websites

 iOS Privacy: Instagram and Facebook can track anything you do on any website in their in-app browser The iOS Instagram and Facebook app render all third party links and ads within their app using a custom in-app browser. This causes various risks for the user, with the host app being able to track every single interaction with external websites, from all form inputs like passwords and addresses, to every single tap. KrauseFX

Apple Sneaks A Big Change Into iOS 5: Phasing Out Developer Access To The UDID

Apple is making a lot of big changes to its mobile operating system with iOS 5, which is dribbling out in betas for developers ahead of a general release later this year. But there is one big change some developers are just starting to take notice of that Apple isn’t talking about that much. In a recent update to the documentation for iOS 5 (which is only available to registered Apple developers, but a copy was forwarded to me), Apple notes that it will be phasing out access to the unique device identifier, or UDID, on iOS devices such as iPhones and iPads. TechCrunch Solution A: UIDevice-with-UniqueIdentifier-for-iOS-5 Brings back the unique identifier support under iOS 5, it uses the device's mac address in combination with the bundle identifier to generate a new hashed unique identifier. gekitz GitHub Alternate Solution B: Appsfire Announces Open Source UDID Replacement For iOS: OpenUDID It is based on the NSProcessInfo (see globallyUniqueString), but may change ...

Starting UIAutomation via command line

You can do it now, starting with XCode 4.2 for iOS5 beta 4 From command line, you can run instruments pointing to the automation template and specify as environment variables the test script you want to execute and destination path for results: instruments -w device_id -t /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Developer/Library/Instruments/PlugIns/AutomationInstrument.bundle/Contents/Resources/Automation.tracetemplate application -e UIASCRIPT script -e UIARESULTSPATH results path DevForums Apple instruments Mac OS X Developer Tools Manual Page