How do dev's here manage code quality and code reviews? Does it suffer when building solo?
So I've been working in teams and I've been building my own side-projects for time immemorial! I love both but really suffer when coding away on my own.
How do other dev's find it? Do you love the freedom of not having other eyes on their work? Do you get frustrated when getting stuck and have no one to help? Do you find bugs goto production and give you headaches?
I've built coderbuds.com to allow solo dev's to share Pull Requests for code reviews. I'm super curious to check I'm on the right track here and whether developers would find this useful.
Thanks!
This is cool, I was just thinking about this topic. I've been thinking about offering code reviews as a service to other devs in some capacity. I find code reviews as a great way to learn and improve my ability to teach.
Looking at your product the first thing that comes to mind is the ability to search/filter by language/framework. Maybe after signup?
Also It would be cool to be able to review code without giving access to one's own Github. Although I'm not sure if Github has that fine grained permissions.
Good luck though!
Also I did think about productising code reviews as a service or a market place but it seems very hard to quantify value. There are some offering as a service for Enterprise at very high cost.
Thanks for your positivity!
I agree that it would be super helpful to find code you can review with tags and filters. I have some of this built already but not released - will focus on this soon.
Maybe like you say, after login an onboarding where you can select your favourite languages/frameworks.
When the handshake is done between the reviewer and code owner, read access is proceed for the GH repo and then after review submitted the read access is revoked. So there is some restriction on access.
Thanks again and if you have any PRs you want reviewed let me know. I will do free code reviews for fellow IHers! 🥳
Ooo this is a good topic.
Unfortunately, when you're solo your priorities are all over the place.. and you tend to prioritize the revenue generating activities (i.e. marketing, growth) over working on tech debt or doing PRs. This is what I've experienced myself.
I like your product idea. I have a few questions:
I've seen solo founders do this before by having a trusted fellow founder, and sharing PRs with each other. They get to intimately know each others' products, and they basically codevelop via the PRs. This obviously requires a lot of trust, and also commitment from both sides to help out the other.
Good questions!
First, yes this works for private repos. You can add someone to your team and that will give access or publish a PR to the public backlog. When someone requests a review Coderbuds sets the reviewer to have read access to do their review and this access is revoked once the review is complete.
It is an interesting challenge to determine quality of code review just as it is an interesting challenge to see how good a PR is!
I think this is handled quite well with reputation and reviews (maybe you can review the code reviewer!?)- like on Stack Overflow or AirBNB… what do you think?
Thanks again for positive feedback! 🙏
For my current project which is not yet launched, I keep a main branch and dev branch. and periodically merge stable code into main. Once I launch I will create a branch for each feature and do pull requests. As far as code reviews, I pay another developer for their time to pair-program / code review / be a soundboard, we talk 1-2 times per week and it's already been worth every penny.
That is a great investment imo. How did you find them?
We used to work together a few years back and have kept in touch. On other projects, I've found people at my co-working space, or via Meetups.
I don't think I am a dev anymore but I wonder do you branch when you code solo?
What's been working for me is to create a branch per feature. Create a Pull Request for it and then merge regularly to the main branch.
So branching and PR/Code Reviewing is connected. I talk in a bit more detail about this here: https://dev.to/coderbuds/how-teams-use-code-reviews-to-get-10x-code-and-what-solo-devs-can-learn-from-this-1ai4
I see. Maybe it's because I never worked on a big project, I tend to commit into production branch whenever I use git. Seems like coderbuds may help me develop better habits.
If you join I'll follow your repo and give you some code reviews if you like.
Thanks, I just joined yet I have nothing to share yet. Guess I'll lurk around and learn from other PRs and their reviews.
Also I wonder, if it was necessary to ask for permission to private repos upfront? Can be off-putting for some people maybe, idk.
Good point about level of GH access. I might be able to ramp it up as required.
Thanks 🙏