Folding the Umbrella

ElixirConf · June 17, 2025, 1:00pm

ElixirConf US 2024 - Saša Jurić

Welcome to ElixirConf

Umbrella projects are widely advocated for their potential to partition code into discrete applications, supposedly offering clearer boundaries and enhancing maintainability. This talk challenges the status quo and argues that the same benefits and more, can be achieved with a plain single-app project structure.

We’ll discuss the downsides of the umbrella structure, and then take a look at the library called boundary, which provides a different, simpler, but more powerful way of managing in-code dependencies. Finally, we’ll top it off by discussing a real-life transition of a 30-apps umbrella project into a single-app.

Join me in this journey beyond the umbrella, as we uncover the path to improving the code modularity while keeping the project structure simple.

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