Problem Creep: Growing Code Repositories

Yesterday, I wrote about how bad the local development on-boarding.

Was this always the situation? The team intentionally set the on-boarding experience to be bad??

I like to think of this as: Problem Creep.

When I joined the team, there were two repositories - one for the front-end code repository and another for the backend code repository.

Then the team added another service. There were already two code repositorys, one more is only 50% more code repositorys overall and everyone on the team already had the first two installed so adding another is trivial.

Adding the next service is 33% more code repositoriess… then another 25% more. Each new code repository added less and less if and only if you were keeping up.

As a new team member, all these code repositories hit you all at once. The team is so used to all the pain that they don’t notice it.

I will continue this tomorrow.