Monorepos have been around for a while but only recently gained popularity in the frontend community. Many developers are being confronted with them now and end up overwhelmed by the terminology and tooling. What are monorepos? Is it just about code colocation? Do I even need one, or is it a large enterprise / corporate thing?
Monorepos come with many benefits but also a lot of challenges. Easy incremental adoption & getting started quickly are just one aspect. Maintaining a healthy monorepo in the long run and keeping it growing and beneficial is a whole other task. But luckily, there's tooling that can support you.
In this talk, we're going to bring some clarity into the field of monorepos, what they are, why you might want to use one, and how to set them up to be successful in the long run.
Interview:
What's the focus of your work these days?
I’m currently working as the Senior Director of Developer Experience at Nx, which is an open source developer tool for monorepos. So my focus right now is on the content and developer relations part, helping educate developers in this space, provide training material, videos and content. Previously I’ve worked as a software architect and consultant, helping Fortune 500 companies around the world succeed with monorepos.
What's the motivation for your talk at QCon London 2023?
To show companies how they can successfully setup and establish monorepos that last. Long-term maintainability of monorepos is a big concern which many initially ignore for the sake of a quick setup. Don’t get me wrong, it shouldn’t be hard to get started with a new monorepo, but there are a couple of key properties developers need to be aware of, which I’d like to go a bit deeper into during my talk. Even though monorepos have been around for a long time and are really technology agnostic, they have experienced a major interest in the frontend community in 2022. With that, obviously, there also come a lot of questions and misconceptions which I hope to be able to clarify.
How would you describe your main persona and target audience for this session?
Well, I have been invited to the frontend track, so I’ll focus on that as my main audience, even though monorepos apply far beyond that. But to be more specific, I target lead developers that are looking into getting to know more about monorepos, whether to adopt them and how to approach that.
Is there anything specific that you'd like people to walk away with after watching your session?
Yeah for sure. First of all, monorepos shouldn’t be a mystery any more for them after the talk, secondly they should clearly understand the value proposition it might give them in their organization. Finally, they should understand what to look out for in terms of features and tooling when adopting them, paying particular attention towards long-term maintainability.
Speaker
Juri Strumpflohner
Sr. Director of Developer Experience @Nx
Juri Strumpflohner is the Sr. Director of Developer Experience for Nx, where he helps developers with questions around frontend development, monorepos, scaling, and modern developer tools. He has 10+ years of experience, from backend to frontend development, and has been consulting for some of the world's biggest companies, helping them scale their development efforts. Juri is a Google Developers Expert in Web Technologies, an international speaker, and an Egghead.io instructor. Reach out to him on Twitter (@juristr) or his website on juri.dev.
Find Juri Strumpflohner at:
Date
Tuesday Mar 28 / 11:50AM BST ( 50 minutes )
Location
Whittle (3rd Fl.)
