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09 · 2025·10 min readProcessTooling

I have changed my mind about monorepos.

I spent four years preaching them and the last six months unpicking one.

› essay.04
essay

For four years I argued, loudly and online, that monorepos were correct. I have spent the last six months pulling one apart, and I have come around to a quieter view.

A monorepo is a way of saying "these things change together." When they do, it is the right call. When they don't — when one half of the repo deploys daily and the other half deploys quarterly — the seam shows up anyway, just in a worse form: cross-cutting branches, ghost-coupling between tests, a CI matrix that grows like ivy.

I think the actual rule is: monorepo the things that ship as one product, and only those. Everything else can be a separate repo and the world is fine.

— Fardan, written in Jakarta
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Up next.

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› essay.01
04 · 20268 min

On building tools you actually want to keep.

A reflection on the half-life of side projects, and why the ones I still use share three properties.