Building a Gradle-Based Monorepo for Kotlin Backends Logo

Yunji Zhong

Software Engineer

DoorDash

Building a Gradle-Based Monorepo for Kotlin Backends

Summit Producer's Highlight

The Doordash team share their experiences exploring whether to use Gradle vs Bazel for building a mono repo. They share the challenges they faced and how certain Gradle Build Tool features helped solve them. They discuss custom plugins, composite builds, and version catalogs. If you’re working on builds/tests in large repos, this talk is for you.

Summit Producer's Highlight

Watch Video

About the session

The Doordash team share their experiences exploring whether to use Gradle vs Bazel for building a mono repo. They share the challenges they faced and how certain Gradle Build Tool features helped solve them. They discuss custom plugins, composite builds, and version catalogs. If you’re working on builds/tests in large repos, this talk is for you.

Watch the video Play Button

View the slides Arrow Down

About this talk

Monorepos are powerful tools to drive code standardization and boost engineering velocity. Moreover, they allow for centralized enforcement of platform standards and simplified dependency management, allowing developers to focus almost exclusively on business logic. All of this comes at the investment cost of dedicated staffing and tooling to overcome technical limitations of version control, build systems and release pipelines.

Learn how DoorDash augmented Gradle’s capabilities to provide a better local development and CI experience for our large codebases. Leveraging Gradle’s composite build feature, we developed some custom tooling that allowed us to build a project graph and accurately compute affected targets for a given change. Subsequently, we’ll talk about options we explored to distribute our builds using Jenkins over Kubernetes as well as an in-house remote execution service, and their trade-offs.

About this talk

Watch The Video

Get more DPE

The slides

Array
DoorDash

Who is Yunji Zhong?

Yunji is a software engineer at DoorDash, working on the Kotlin platform team. He develops foundational frameworks for microservices and resilient client libraries (e.g., HTTP, gRPC, Kafka, Redis). He also designs the monorepo structure for Kotlin Gradle projects and has created an efficient distributed build system. Previously, he worked at Uber, developing their Go monorepo that hosted all Golang projects.