Quantum Tech Agency
All posts
Engineering··5 min read

Why we chose a monorepo (and when we would not)

Turborepo plus pnpm has been a force multiplier for us. It is also wrong for plenty of teams.

by Quantum Admin

Our setup

One repo, three packages: apps/web (Next.js), apps/api (NestJS), and packages/types (shared TS). Turborepo orchestrates the pipeline, pnpm handles the install graph.

Why it works for us

Shared types are the killer feature. A response shape change in NestJS shows up as a TypeScript error in Next.js in the same PR. No drift, no client SDK to keep in sync, no "the schema is out of date" Slack thread.

When we would not

If our frontend and backend teams worked on different release cadences with different on-call rotations, the monorepo would be friction not leverage. If we had ten apps instead of two, we would invest in Nx instead of Turborepo. If one of the apps was a mobile app with its own native toolchain, we would split.

Like what you read?

We are usually shipping something interesting — tell us what you are working on.

Start a Project