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Comment by esrauch | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious how a company ends up with 10 git repositories per microservice, and 4 repositories per engineer?

That's just a manifestation of Conway's Law [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law

Taken in a healthy organization, Conway's Law is not a bad thing. It is really just more of an observation. So... taken to this example, it sounds like the company is a confusing mess of people trying to figure out who they need to coordinate with to make something happen.

> It is really just more of an observation.

Or maybe some instruction into how to assemble the organization.

True. I was using it as an argument to adjust the system architecture, as well. My argument was it didn't matter really which changed to get things into alignment, but that having them be different was a bit of a concern.

4 repositories per engineer

Is that strange? I've got 6 repos at work for various utilities and "personal" projects I'm working on in addition to the 4 repos for team wide projects.

I have over 3 dozen private Git repos for personal amusement or utility projects for stuff that professional consumer software doesn't work as well as what I want. Then I have almost at least 10 repos on GutHub (not this userid). At my last work, 9 month contract, I had 4 I think, aside from our main team repos just to manage personal info documents, my bin folder, etc. It's easy for one developer to have several. On my Linodes I keep /etc in its own repo as well, and my VirtualBox and VMware VMs then inside those I keep several Git repos.

Edit: I remembered more personal projects, make that almost 3 dozen personal Git repos.

THE HN PC police are back, up to their old antics.

My guess (and it is just a guess) is that each of these services is made up of multiple even smaller libraries which are each being version controlled as a distinct entity. I'm not sure I could fully get behind working at that level of granularity, but it would explain how you end up with quite so many git repositories.

From what I understand, they split their microservices into logical packages and libraries, each of which have their own repo. Then some microservices have a separate repo to track configuration changes.

  10 git repositories per microservice

I'm reminded of http://danluu.com/monorepo/

I would bet that they have location data in git with each major market being it's own repo.

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