Yes it was mostly micro services, with a separate frontend repo, and a separate repo for deploy scripts, some separate libraries that were shared between the microservices, there may have even been a separate repo for documentation, I don't remember exactly.
I think it really just came down to dividing the repos into chunks that the deployment scripts could use/trigger off of. Instead of developing in a way that makes sense for developers and bending the deployment to fit. Since it was all in one directory on his computer, it was basically a mono repo from his perspective. Committing from the IDE just committed to whichever repo was changed, and since he was the only developer he never saw the downside. When I had to take it over ghorg[0] really came in handy. It's a script to clone all repos from a user/organization on gitlab, github, and others. Then once I opened up all the repos as one pycharm project I was able to get some stuff done, but at that point I might as well just had one repo with a separate directory for each.
EDIT: I also just remembered that gitlab is much better than github if you are going to go the route of multiple repos for one project. Gitlab lets you create namespaces to group your repos, so if they're all in the same namespace, you could have documentation to just tell people to clone all of them.
I think it really just came down to dividing the repos into chunks that the deployment scripts could use/trigger off of. Instead of developing in a way that makes sense for developers and bending the deployment to fit. Since it was all in one directory on his computer, it was basically a mono repo from his perspective. Committing from the IDE just committed to whichever repo was changed, and since he was the only developer he never saw the downside. When I had to take it over ghorg[0] really came in handy. It's a script to clone all repos from a user/organization on gitlab, github, and others. Then once I opened up all the repos as one pycharm project I was able to get some stuff done, but at that point I might as well just had one repo with a separate directory for each.
[0]https://github.com/gabrie30/ghorg
EDIT: I also just remembered that gitlab is much better than github if you are going to go the route of multiple repos for one project. Gitlab lets you create namespaces to group your repos, so if they're all in the same namespace, you could have documentation to just tell people to clone all of them.