Weeknotes from Buttondown

On monorepos

I wanted to write about annual planning, and how this year is going to differ from previous ones, but I have (in true fashion) procrastinated finalizing my annual plan a little bit. So that'll be next week, and this week I would like to write about... monorepos.

Buttondown is now in a monorepo. There's two big advantages of this approach (and these advantages are not particularly new to Buttondown):

  1. Code sharing is much easier. I now have a lovely OpenAPI spec that powers the documentation page (and is published to its own repository, though I'll get to that in a minute); rather than having to perform a bit of a shell game keeping that spec in sync across a number of repositories, I can have a single source of truth.
  2. Concomitant changes are much easier. The ideal feature launch involves not just changing some stuff in the main application but writing a release note, adding a changelog entry, adding documentation — timing the release of all of these PRs was frustrating.

There are a couple downsides:

As you can probably tell from the benefits and drawbacks, this is...marginal. It took around five hours to finish everything (less than I expected) and I've probably recouped all of fifteen minutes' worth of effort in doing so. (Which, frankly, isn't a bad calculus if you extrapolate from a week to a year or so.)

But this is the time of year for hastily undertaking such projects! I'm trying to keep the backlog down low, but all of the "this seems nice but when am I going to have the time" type of work happens right now, in that lovely December twilight, where the roadmap doesn't matter and the sales pipeline slows down a bit.

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