Reviewable, a GitHub code review tool, posts about its product, app development lessons, and recurring bugs.
Commenters praise Reviewable for stacked reviews and rebase handling, and compare it to Google's internal Critique and Microsoft's CodeFlow.
>See reviewer presence so that you can see if someone is already reviewing and avoid unnecessary pings.
>Visibly values privacy and security above all else
These two things seem squarely at odds. Personally, I don't want my code review tool announcing to developers when I'm looking at their PR.
The fact that it's a Chrome extension would also be a big blocker for me. I run a dev team, and I wouldn't ask any of my teammates to install a browser extension to participate in code reviews, especially one that's only available for Chrome.
I care a lot about code reviews [0], but the features here don't really resonate with me.
- Blocking vs. non-blocking: This is useful, but the default should be that a comment is blocking. Otherwise, it makes the default that all the reviewer's notes are optional unless they go out of their way to mark them as important.
- Thread status history: I think the status history is much less important than the status right now. In other words, I'd like to know if a review is blocked on the author or reviewer. I'm not that interested in what the status was yesterday.
- Metrics: I worry that these focus on the wrong thing. I'm trying to maximize usefulness of my review rather than speedrun through them to improve my PR time.
One of the huge gaps in Github's tool is the ability to do multi-round reviews (e.g., "show me what's changed since my last round of notes"). You can kind of bend Github to show you the right diff, but then it can't show the…
Yep, I agree! I work at, and use, Reviewable (https://reviewable.io) and we're the best way to review code on GitHub because we've focused on making the whole process better at every step.
We've improved diffing, not only for large files (we support larger files than GitHub does) but also for understanding that diff. Have you ever reviewed a PR twice, but the second time around all your comments are gone and you have no idea what happened to the code since the last time you saw it? Unlike GitHub, Reviewable tracks PR's based on revisions, so you can see the diff between the previous revision and the current one, no matter what the author did to the branch to get here.
We've also improved commenting. The OP mentions putting a discussion in the sidebar because commenting on the main thread gets drowned out by GitHub's audit trail. With Reviewable, we separate the audit information from the main discussion, so you can discuss the PR, an individual file, or a part of a diff without losing track of or getting distracted away from any of those discussions.
We also support pre-approval of PR's that satisfy business requirements at a technical level. This is often taken advantage of by teams that have bots that make certain, software-checkable changes (such as whitespace-only changes), or monorepo organizations with an `experimental/$USER` folder structure.
The linux kernel, which is open source and does want contributors, is doing more-or-less just fine with an email-based PR and review flow.
If it's an open source project, it should be using an open source review platform that allows improvements and specialization of the code hosting too. Using github, where the review tools are bad and can't be improved by an outsider, is a slap in the face to open source.
Frankly, I'm tired of people using github. The fact that it still doesn't have any idea of patchsets and diffs between them is cripplingly bad (i.e. you force push a new version of your change, there's no easy way to review the diff between the old and new version of your change). Having to use yet more third party tools, like https://reviewable.io, isn't an answer to this, it's just a sign that github should be open source so these could be forks or first-party tools.
It's also just insulting for an open source project to force people to use a proprietary platform owned by microsoft.
Reviewable | Bay Area, CA, USA or Remote | Full Time | Generalist / Backend Developer | Typescript | https://reviewable.io/
https://github.com/Reviewable/Reviewable/tree/master/careers
Reviewable is a very small, bootstrapped business that sells our code review software to some of the largest companies around. We've been around long enough to be much more stable than your average startup, yet stayed small enough to avoid crippling bureaucracy — everybody reports directly to the founder/CEO. We're engineer-centric and fully remote. However, we prefer hiring US residents and offer the usual benefits: health and dental insurance, 401(k) plans with company contributions, unlimited vacation, etc. We've built a company and a codebase where we enjoy working day-to-day and hope that you will too!
We're looking for a backend generalist with a love for problem-solving with algorithms and data structures!
Apply at https://github.com/Reviewable/Reviewable/tree/master/careers
Anything where we can't host the tool and point it at git repositories on a server we control is a complete non-starter for us, unfortunately. This is mostly because our development and test environments are not connected to the Internet.
Other than that, I took a quick look at your product and it's feature-wise close to something I would want to use. Only comments I would make would be that non GitHub projects generally want the review tool to handle the branch management (a.k.a storing pull requests, flagging their status, etc.): of course only focusing on GitHub lets you not worry about that and get a product running much sooner... You should spend some serious time looking at your page load times as well - I'm 10msec away from your server and the demo code review at https://reviewable.io/reviews/Reviewable/demo/1 took nearly three full seconds to load, even with most static assets already cached since I didn't timeline it on the first attempt.
Thanks!
GitHub actually does some of these things already. Do these solutions help/suffice?
- Batching all comments in a single send: This is a core GitHub code review feature. You can send immediately by pressing the "Add single comment" button, but if you "Start a review", your comments are batched.
- Built-in fixes and lints on the PR "Files changed" tab: GitHub Checks offer this, although not many teams have adopted it (that I'm aware of).
- Changing indentation: The "Diff settings" menu has a "Hide whitespace changes" option, although it's not (afaik) possible to persist this.
- Auto-submit if tests pass: The Refined GitHub browser extension offers this (https://github.com/sindresorhus/refined-github), kind of. You need to keep the page open in your browser while it finishes.
Also, have you seen https://reviewable.io/ (made by an Xoogler) and does that appeal to you?