Better code reviews for GitHub. It integrates with GitHub to provide a better reviewing and commenting experience for pull requests. Free for open source!
Ah yeah, it only supports Chrome (and Chrome based browsers) and Firefox for now. I've been meaning to add an error message if you use a different browser.
No newsletter yet, but you can follow me on Twitter for now @jameslao.
I can see how the iterations control can be not obvious. I'll add a docs section that explains it. The two columns of radio buttons represent your selection for the left and right side of the diff. You can also click on any iteration to diff it against the base.
I've made a couple notes based on this to help me prioritize next. Thanks for taking the time to provide all this amazing feedback!
I hear you. Crocodile has a couple features that try to address this.
1. More comment states. Comments start as "open". The workflow I had in mind was that once the author addresses it, they would mark it as "resolved". The reviewer can go to the comments view (in the meta section on the left nav) where they can filter to resolved comments. If it looks good, they can mark it as "closed" or "open" again if they want more changes. I have this as a suggested workflow in the docs. [1]
2. The iterations section in the left nav lets you compare any two iterations. You can use this to see what has changed since your last review. Crocodile even indicates which iteration your last review was on to make this easy.
That's actually a use case I've thought about. When review time came around, one of my past managers would compile statistics on everyone's reviews to see how much they've been participating.
Another feature I've thought about is "show me all of person X's reviews and comments across all repos". That would have been super useful when I was on promo panels to go through and see if a promo candidate's review comments were useful, constructive, kind, etc.
If you click the "Comments ->" link in the meta section on the left nav of the review, it will take you to my version of the comments panel.
A couple improvements I made:
* You can see the whole discussion. The last time I used CodeFlow it only showed one line of the comment which often wasn't enough for me to remember what it was so in practice I always had to click on every single one to see the whole thing. Not a big deal with CodeFlow since it was so snappy as you mentioned.
* It shows a preview of the code that was commented on to provide context.
Thanks for taking a look! Great to see other CodeFlow fans out there.
Comments should get transferred just fine across rebases and force pushes. If they don't, you can let me know using the feedback form at the top right.
Supporting other VCS providers, even non-Git ones, is on my list. The underlying data model is agnostic to GitHub so it's just a matter of having demand for it and doing the work!
> Do you support features like github suggestions which can be committed easily by author?
Not right now. The suggestion feature is something I want to add in the future if there's interest though!
> Given your history with Microsoft and their internal tool which this is inspired by, how long until github copies some of the ideas?
No idea! But CodeFlow had been around for many years before they acquired GitHub so they've had plenty of time to do it! I think this is an existential fear that anyone building code review tools has. For Crocodile, I think the long term strategy will be to decouple this from GitHub so that it can work with any source control provider. I architected it this way from the beginning but decided to target GitHub first because they have mindshare and because it made it really easy to dogfood since I host my code on GitHub.
> Are there potential problems you see outside of current product?
There's the one you already mentioned, which is GitHub improving their PR system, but there's not much I can do about that. Current problems I'm looking at are roadmap related. I have a few ideas of features I'd like to add, but no real indication on what to do next. Hence, posting on HN to get feedback. :)
Thanks for taking a look! Yeah, not having admin access is definitely a problem. Using a PAT is an interesting idea that I'll have to think about that from a security and liability perspective.
Pluton seems like the next evolution of the TPM which has been around for many years. Many (most?) modern CPUs have a TPM built into the CPU already (Intel PTT and AMD fTPM) so it's not a huge change from the status quo as far as I can tell.
I use HTMX + Alpine.js for a project I'm working on. It's been pretty nice and I think my only complaint is that the requests are form encoded instead of JSON. There is a HTMX extension that can JSON encode the requests, but all values get encoded as strings so its not great if you want lists, numbers, etc.
I also use Tailwind CSS and I found a way to make that work nicely with HTMX for CSS transitions which I wrote about [0].
When I was shopping for a refrigerator, I went to a local appliance center and talked to a person there. I learned a few things:
- In door water dispensers and ice makers are unreliable and will likely break.
- Availability of repair technicians and spare parts varies by brand and is region dependent.
- Different brands are good at different appliances. For instance, Bosch is well known for their dishwashers. Unfortunately I didn't find one in my budget that clearly stood out from the rest.
Never hurts to talk to someone at a local appliance center if you have one nearby.
Probably a mix of both. Many of the founders of code review tools came from companies that had internal code review tools (Microsoft has CodeFlow, Google has Critique, Facebook has Phabricator) and they missed those tools after leaving those companies.
If anyone is interested, I've been building a code review tool called Crocodile[0] that lets you review GitHub PRs. It has a similar file browser to the left plus floating comments, threaded discussions, and more.
Better code reviews for GitHub. It integrates with GitHub to provide a better reviewing and commenting experience for pull requests. Free for open source!