Building a faster CI pipeline with Turborepo and pnpm

Over the past eight months, the frontend team at Tinybird has modernized its code management and continuous integration (CI) process by implementing a monorepo structure alongside Turborepo and pnpm, significantly reducing execution times despite a large increase in code size and test coverage. Tinybird, a serverless real-time database platform, has improved its developer experience by consolidating its previously fragmented codebase into a single repository, which eliminated duplicated code and streamlined task management. Turborepo has enhanced their CI efficiency through intelligent task handling and caching, while pnpm has accelerated package management with its superior dependency resolution. These changes have allowed Tinybird to ship code faster and with greater confidence, cutting down CI times by about five hours each week, even as they continue to increase their lines of code and unit tests. The team plans to continue improving by fully migrating to TypeScript, splitting frontend from backend repositories, and transitioning from React to Next.js, further fostering development speed and feedback loops.