Here here yowlingcat. Article is a way too prescriptive and agreed, borders on irresponsible. Monorepo vs polyrepo argument is way too broad a subject to create generalized stereotypes like this. These opinions sadly are taken as facts by impressionable managers, new developers, etc, and have cascading effects on the rest of us in the industry. Use what makes sense in the project environment and team, don't just throw shade at teams who are successfully and productively using monorepos where they make sense. Sure there is good reason to split things up on boundaries sometimes, (breaking out libraries, rpc modules, splitting along dev team boundaries, etc etc etc), but not blindly by default. Will Torvalds split up the kernel into a polyrepo after reading this article? Something tells me that would be a bit disruptive.
It's interesting that you talk about "team's using monorepos". I think that's different than what the article is arguing against, which is an entire company (100+ devs) using a monorepo.
A team with 5 services and a web front-end in a single repo is doable with regular git. It's a different beast I think.
Thanks softawre, what triggered me is the sensationalist title and general bashing of monorepo's (which a large percentage of impressionable readers will walk away from this article thinking, ie: that monorepo's are only for dummies and you're doing it wrong if you're not using a polyrepo). A less inflammatory title more along the lines of "Having trouble scaling development of a single codebase amongst 100's of developers? Consider a polyrepo". This argument comes up in developer shops almost as much as emacs vs vi, tabs or spaces, etc.
When you have 100+ developers on a project, managing inbound commits/merges/etc will become tedious if they're all committing/merging into one effective codebase.
IMHO, It depends on the project, the team makeup, the codebase's runtime footprint, etc whether or not/or when it makes sense to start breaking it up into smaller fragments, or on the other hand, vacuuming up the fragments into a monorepo.
I did enjoy reading Steve Fink's from Mozilla's comment (it's the top response on the OP's medium article) and counter arguments about monorepos vs polyrepos in that ecosystem (also clearly north of 100 developers). It's easy to miss if you don't expand the medium comment section, but very much worth reading.
