71–80 of 249 posts
"This scale – the scale of devprod, and in turn the scale of the overall organization, such that it could afford 10 FTEs on tooling – was a major factor in our choices" Is basically the summary for most mono/multi repo discussions, and a bunch of other related ones.
> In addition, Stripe’s monorepo was (to our knowledge) the largest Ruby codebase in existence Bigger than shoppify's?
> currently amounting to over 15 million lines of code spread across 150,000 files
The monorepo has only gotten bigger over the last two years (source: I work at Stripe).
>Some caveats: It’s been nearly five years, and I have no doubt that I have misremembered some of the specific details, even though I’m confident in the overall picture. I’m also certain that Stripe has continued evolving and I make no claim this document represents the developer experience at Stripe as of today. Are there any more recently ex-Stripe folks here willing and able to comment on how Stripe's developer en…
The biggest difference not mentioned is the article is that code is no longer kept on developer machines. The sync process described in the article was well-designed, but also was a fairly constant source of headaches. (For example, sometimes the file watcher would miss an update and the code on your remote machine would be broken in strange ways, and you'd have to recognize that it was a sync issue instead of an actual problem with your code.) As a result, the old devbox system was superseded by "remote devboxes", which also host the code. Engineers use VSCode remote development via SSH. It works shockingly well for a codebase the size of Stripe's.
There are actually several different monorepos at Stripe, which is a constant source of frustration. There have been lots of efforts to try to unify the codebase into a single git repo, but it was difficult for a lot of reasons, not the least of which was the "main" monorepo was already testing the limits of the solution used for git hosting.
Overall, maintaining good developer productivity is an extremely challenging problem. This is especially true for a company like Stripe, which is both too large to operate as a "small" company and too small to operate as a "big" company. Even with a well-funded team of lots of super talented people putting forth their best efforts, it's tough to keep all of the wheels fully greased.
Maybe a silly question, but why all this engineering effort when you could host the dev environment locally? By running a Linux VM on your local machine you get a consistent environment that you can ssh to, remove the latency issues but you remove all the complexity of syncing that they’ve created. That’s a setup that’s worked well for me for 15 years but maybe I’m missing some other benefit?
You're limited by the resources available to you on your local laptop and when you close that laptop the dev environment stops running. Remote dev environments are more costly and complicated to maintain but they can be shared, can scale vertically (or horizontally) on demand, can persist when you exit them, and managing access to various internal services from dev environments can in some cases be simpler. It also c…
"This scale – the scale of devprod, and in turn the scale of the overall organization, such that it could afford 10 FTEs on tooling – was a major factor in our choices" Is basically the summary for most mono/multi repo discussions, and a bunch of other related ones.
It doesn't matter if you have a mono-rep or multi-repo, you will need engineers on tooling to make it work if your project is large. There are pros and cons to both multi-repo and mono-repo with no one right answer (despite what some will tell you). They are different pros and cons, but which is best depends on your particular context.
It became clear to me that cloud-only is not the way to go, but instead a local-first, cloud-optional approach.
https://mootoday.com/blog/dev-environments-in-the-cloud-are-...
This isn't recommended practice really and there is nothing about this which justifies having to maintain huge code bases in a single folder or multiple folders in one larger one. Won't be surprised to see that many would probably need a safari map or README documentation in every single folder to navigate a repository as large as stripes. Sounds like an emergence of a new bad practice if you are having to praise how…
Meta also has a massive monorepo accessed primarily through cloud devservers. When several of the world’s most successful software companies use this approach, it’s hard to argue that it’s inherently bad. Of course it’s sensible to discuss what lessons apply to smaller companies who don’t have the luxury of dedicated tooling teams supporting the monorepo and dev environment.
They decided to keep the code on the local machine, but the language server on the remote one. That seems like a recipe for inconsistency. You only get relevant results from your language server once your code has synced.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Won't be surprised to see that many would probably need a safari map or README documentation in every single folder to navigate a repository as large as stripes. No different to having thousands of smaller repos instead. I personally dislike monorepos, for very niche, in-the-weeds operational reasons (as an infra person), but their ergonomics for DX cannot be understated.
The 'ergonomics for DX' benefit is that you can share code across projects without having to go down the path of creating a package / library pushed to some internal registry and pulled by each project right? Or are there any other aspects to the monorepo architecture that make it beneficial for large companies like that? Just curious, I've never worked in such an environment myself.
Example: Service A requires version 1.1 of libFoo and libFoo 1.1 requires version 0.1 of libBar. But Service A also directly uses libBar version 0.2. Now you have a conflict.
If libFoo and libBar are internal code stored in a monorepo they're automatically version-compatible because there is only one version of both.