Comment by underdeserver | Hacker News Reader

Comment by underdeserver | Hacker News Reader

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I left Google around six months ago. I worked in medium and small companies, currently at a startup with ~30 devs.

I would say the vast majority of it works well, some you just don't need until you hit scale (here, scale in the number of developers).

For example, policies work if you have <20 engineers, probably don't really work otherwise.

Blaze/Bazel I miss a lot. Just wrangling the dependencies between shared packages is a mess (though we might just suck at configuring Poetry - at any rate it's not intuitive). Building and deploying is much more involved.

Another thing I miss is code review the Google way. Google asks that you review within 24 hours, reviews by (the equivalent of a) commit and not by PR, and strongly advises to keep commits small; The GitHub PR workflow is terrible in comparison:

1) it nudges you into batching commits into large PRs

2) Is the PR message informative? Is each commit's? What about squash and merge - how many people edit that message? At Google part of the code review is reviewing the commit message. When you squash and merge, that's post approval, so you can't even do that.

3) Hidden conversations? What the actual fudge

4) How many comments have I not addressed yet? For that matter, how many PRs are waiting for my attention and when were they sent?

Of all the Google dev tools, I miss Critique the most. GitHub is terrible at giving enough context to efficiently review a PR on a second or third pass.

I think coupling commits with review progress was a mistake.

Shameless plug but if you're missing Critique and working on GitHub, try CodeApprove (https://codeapprove.com) which brings as much of the Critique magic to GitHub as possible.

This seems very simiilar to Gitlab's MR. Does anyone know all of them to highlight their strengths and drawbacks?

Offtopic but, aren't you scared by "GitHub improves its PR workflow" and put your product out of business?

Yes that's a real risk! CodeApprove is not (yet) anyone's full time job so it's also an acceptable risk.

However I think the biggest issue with the landscape for code review tools is that 99% of developers use the default system that ships with their VCS. So on most teams, that's GitHub. People should be actively choosing their code review tools just like they choose their VCS, IDE, CI/CD platform, Issue Trackers, etc. It's one of many tools that makes up your SDLC "Stack".

They haven't done it yet. What's been stopping them?

As long as CodeApprove and Reviewable remain niche they've got nothing to worry about.

https://reviewable.io is the earliest full-powered Critique alternative for GitHub.

It supports some cool things Critique doesn't/didn't, such as reviewing multi-commit branches (also across history-rewriting force-push cleanups), and indicating exactly the nature of your comment (just FYI, or you want this to be changed before you'll give your approval).

(I was an intern in the initial making of Critique, and subsequently got interested in finding an out-of-Google alternative. I contributed a bit to other review tools such as ReviewBoard, and actively used Gerrit, Crucible, Phabricator, and GitLab reviews.)

When looking for a Critique alternative for my startup, reviewable.io had just appeared and ticked all the boxes, and we use it successfully for many years. The drawbacks are that it's GitHub-only and isn't free software.

Small commit reviews sound miserable. You have no context of the rest of the branch unless you look for it, you have no idea what's in the author's head for future commits (I can imagine some devout YAGNI follower rejecting a commit because a function argument is unused, which the author planned to use tomorrow..), and it sounds like it would encourage minor nitpicking when there's not that much to review. As opposed to a whole branch PR where I can see the entire feature at once and how it comes together.

For a large feature you work off a design doc or an issue tracker issue (Jira ticket equivalent). If you're going to call the function tomorrow tell your reviewer you're going to call it tomorrow. We're all adults.

Re not that much to review, it's the exact opposite. When people get 400 line code reviews they tend to nitpick on style. When they get a 100 line CR, they critique on naming, organization, consistency.

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