Everything as code: How we manage our company in one monorepo

Fuck yes I love this attitude to transparency and code-based organization. This is the kind of stuff that gets me going in the morning for work, the kind of organization and utility I honestly aspire to implement someday.

As many commenters rightly point out, this doesn't run the human side of the company. It could, though, if the company took this approach seriously enough. My personal two cents, it could be done as a separate monorepo, provided the company and its staff remain disciplined in its execution and maintenance. It'd be far easier to have a CSV dictate employees and RBAC rather than bootstrapping Active Directory and fussing with its integrations/tentacles. Putting department processes into open documentation removes obfuscation and a significant degree of process politics, enabling more staff to engage in self-service rather than figuring out who wields the power to do a thing.

I really love everything about this, and I'd like to see more of it, AI or not. Less obfuscation and more transparency is how you increase velocity in any organization.

Never expose your storage/backend type. Whenever you do, any consumers (your UI, consumers of your API, whatever) will take dependencies on it in ways you will not expect or predict. It makes changes somewhere between miserable and impossible depending on the exact change you want to make.

A UI-specific type means you can refactor the backend, make whatever changes you want, and have it invisible to the UI. When the UI eventually needs to know, you can expose that in a safe way and then update the UI to process it.

months-long delays on important updates due to some large project doing extremely bad things and pushing off a minor refactor endlessly has been the norm for me. but they're big so they wield a lot of political power so they get away with it every time.

or worse, as a library owner: spending INCREDIBLE amounts of time making sure a very minor change is safe, because you can't gradually roll it out to low-risk early adopter teams unless it's feature-flagged to hell and back. and if you missed something, roll back, write a report and say "oops" with far too many words in several meetings, spend a couple weeks triple checking feature flagging actually works like everyone thought (it does not, for at least 27 teams using your project), and then try again. while everyone else working on it is also stuck behind that queue.

monorepos suck imo. they're mostly company lock-in, because they teach most absolutely no skills they'd need in another job (or for contributing to open source - it's a brain drain on the ecosystem), and all external skill is useless because every monorepo is a fractal snowflake of garbage.