Personal Monorepo

Today I completed my long-standing project to merge all of my open source Go repositories into a single repo.

At some point I drank the koolaid that monorepos are better than poly-repos. I don’t really want to go into all of the various reasons for that, but I will say there are a couple clear benefits for my own code:

  1. I can easily change code across all callers if everything is in a single repo.
  2. I benefit from whatever automation I set up for all of my projects.

I’ve written about leatherman here plenty of times before, so I won’t go into too much depth in this post. In short: I already built github actions based CICD for my leatherman, have nice little test libraries, etc. I also tend to have the leatherman binary handy everywhere (hence the name.)

In December I migrated my notes software zine to leatherman. That wasn’t too hard. The main difficulty was finding a non-C implementation of SQLite so I can avoid cgo (which I found, absurdly.)

That was mostly pretty easy because it’s pretty simple, young software. The other major software I wanted to merge in was amygdala, a notes system (of course) built around SMS and deployed to Heroku.

To merge it I took the following steps:

  1. Fetched the Amygdala history from a leatherman checkout: git fetch git://github.com/frioux/amygdala.
  2. Made a branch of that code where I’d re-arrange the code before trying to use git merge: git checkout -b pre-merge FETCH_HEAD
  3. I made a commit where I moved things around (like main.go from the root of the repo to where it’d be post proper-merge)
  4. After that I did a proper git merge, which included actually building amygdala into the leatherman binary.

Finally I updated Heroku and Twilio.

Now that this is done I expect to make the leatherman notes tool support more, or even all, of the stuff Amygdala can do. The SMS interface is useful but obviously very limited. Having access to a full web interface is preferable.

Comically I now have three notes related systems in my leatherman:

  • notes: a stateless web interface that runs on a rasbperry pi and interacts with files over dropbox
  • zine: a rich web interface that runs on a laptop and interacts with local files.
  • amygdala: a stateless SMS interface that runs on heroku and interacts with files over dropbox.

I would like to merge notes and zine, such that they are just different modes of the same thing. I’d like amgydala to be an SMS oriented subset, rather than a weird vestigal alternate path.

zine rebuilds an SQLite database on demand with basically no persistence. I think that’s a good default; for notes what I want to do is to read all of the files from dropbox at startup and build an in memory SQLite database and update the database when files change. I already have a pretty good file-watch interface for dropbox. The risk though is that somehow I miss changes and get out of sync, so maybe daily or hourly I reload everything and track unexpected changes.

(Affiliate links below.)

Recently Brendan Gregg’s Systems Performance got its second edition released. He wrote about it here. I am hoping to get a copy myself soon. I loved the first edition and think the second will be even more useful.

At the end of 2019 I read BPF Performance Tools. It was one of my favorite tech books I read in the past five years. Not only did I learn how to (almost) trivially see deeply inside of how my computer is working, but I learned how that works via the excellent detail Gregg added in each chapter. Amazing stuff.

Posted Sat, Jan 23, 2021

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