A way to organise a very large Python monolith

Hi, I’m David, a Python developer at Kraken Technologies. I work on Kraken: a Python application which has, at last count, 27,637 modules. Yes, you read that right: nearly 28k separate Python files - not including tests. I do this along with 400 other developers worldwide, constantly merging in code. And all anyone needs to make a change - and kick start a deployment of the software that runs 17 different energy and utility companies, with many millions of customers - is one single approval from a colleague on Github.

Now you may be thinking this sounds like a recipe for chaos. Honestly, I would have said the same. But it turns out that large numbers of developers can, at least in the domain we work in, work effectively on a large Python monolith. There are lots of reasons why this is possible, many of them cultural rather than technical, but in this blog post I want to explain about how the organisation of our code helps to make this possible.