How Affirm transformed its massive 10GB monorepo from hours to minutes

Join us with Brett Davis, Senior Staff Software Engineer at Affirm, as he reveals how their team transformed a massive 10GB monorepo from a bottleneck into a productivity asset. In this technical deep dive, learn how Affirm implemented a caching and pre-warming solution that reduced cold repository checkout times from 10+ minutes to under 45 seconds.

Brett will walk us through the technical architecture behind Affirm's Buildkite implementation, addressing the unique challenges of managing large-scale codebases in a financial technology environment. Learn practical insights on monorepo optimization, from identifying early warning signs to implementing pre-warming solutions that scale with your organization.

In this discussion, we'll cover:

• How Affirm reduced cold repository checkout times from 10+ minutes to 44 seconds using automated nightly snapshots and S3 caching
• The trade-offs between monorepo benefits (auditability, compliance, unified workflows) and performance challenges at scale
• Affirm's decoupled bootstrapping architecture that enables flexible agent configuration without complex CloudFormation updates
• How emergency hot-fix scenarios became the catalyst for infrastructure investment, turning a 1-hour deployment delay into a 2.5-minute process

Discover how your team could benefit from implementing similar caching and pre-warming solutions to accelerate your own development workflows.