Why a Monorepo?

The Beginning

I first became intrigued with monorepos in 2019 when I was working for AVB Marketing where we had a multi-tenant React application for over 700 appliance and furniture stores across the country. Why was I intersted in monorepos at this time?

Well, our application had some main areas: csm, catalog, product, the cart + checkout, and blog pages. But some of our members only used the cms and blog pages yet their users were downloading a lot of code for the other pages that they would never even know existed. I wanted to break each one of those areas into their own package and have a slim and ecommerce version.

At that time, the main players were Nx and Lerna and I got about as far as a POC for our current app alongside documenation using Docusaurus.

It wasn't until about 2 years ago where we implemented Turborepo at Highlight to split our application into two. We had two major users of the application: an account executive and a customer. We started with a single React application with a bunch of if statements based on role to two applications with some shared components. We had a single sprint to get this done, and with this being our first interactions with monoreps were under quite the durress.

The Revamp

It wasn't until recently where we have started to revamp how we use Turborepo based on a recent talk at the last Next.js Conference 2023. We had been using the same setup as our original foray and had been feeling some pain points with CI time(mainly unit test time).

We had 2 applications, and 2 shared packages; one for ui components and one for an api client. This talk sparked something in our team to double down on the monorepo and we quickly started to create small packages for new features and put shared configs into their own packages too.

Inspiration

Between these amazing pieces of content, there had been something awakened inside of me. I immediately started breaking out every config into it's own package: eslint, next, postcss, prettier, stylelint, typescript. The patterns I was following were the ones set by T3; the turborepo flavor of the popular stack from Theo & team. I got my team to start doing new feature work in their own packages. This weird thing started to happen, it felt like we were gamifying writing new code.

How is it Helpful?

I have very strong nuerodivergent tendencies which means I binge a new app idea for a couple days, weeks, months at best and then fizzle out to never return. Well, with a monorepo, when I get a new app idea and start to work on it, I am not starting from scratch. I have all of the ui components and utilities from my previous adventures.

I also find it helpfull when working in a specific package, it helps keep the blinders on and trying to keep that package's public api as slim as possible. I have some packages where all they do is export the view component imported into a Next.js page. Everything else is defined within the package and is only used within the package.

What Now?

I invision myself working in this repo for awhile, trying to get the first iteration of Pi-Hub out with a local temperature and wallpaper feature. This blog will hopefully serve as an outlet for my learnings and rants along the way. I also have yet another idea brewing, one that is not new, but one that I wish to return to for an online card game we played all the time for swimming and water polo.