>Splitting up the code into multiple files enabled us to scale the project.
I really don't get this at all. More files == more scalable? Someone more knowledgeable about ... whatever topic is relevant here care to explain this to me?
I really don't get this at all. More files == more scalable? Someone more knowledgeable about ... whatever topic is relevant here care to explain this to me?
He's basically saying that if you have 10 files and 2 developers the chances of collision (or merging issues) is small, but having 20 developers working from 10 files makes things more sticky.
To some degree, he's not incorrect, in that over time, you'll spend more time managing the merging and conflict process than you will writing code.
Obviously, there are modern tools that will help alleviate this problem, but the deeper you go, the worse it is. This was the reason that "old" VCS had exclusive locks.
Managing essential merge issues relates to success at dividing work up into highly cohesive, loosely coupled units. The accidental merge issues are not a big deal in good environments.
Generally, I'll write a little build script in Node that concatenates and minifies all my JS and CSS before actually deploying to production to keep the number of HTTP requests down.