Codelantis

Understand & review pull requests faster

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September 12, 2023 Relaunched Codelantis (former ReadyforReview)

If you have a pull request (or merge request) to review, check out the new site at https://www.codelantis.com

So... it's 2 years later and I relaunched my code review tool at https://www.codelantis.com (former name: ReadyforReview)

What happened?

A couple of weeks ago, I switched to Linux and realized that my review tool didn't work (despite using Docker to prevent exactly this). Bummer!

Having spent my time mostly on other side projects, my initial reaction was to just use GitLab's own review features again and basically ditch my own tool.

I tried this for roughly 1 day and quickly became very frustrated with everything being slow, clumsy, and impractical. This was the moment I realized that I really need my tool to work.

This experience motivated me a lot to work on this tool again!

I updated the tech stack (now SvelteKit 😻) to optimize the project for speed of development. I already added new features in the last couple of days:

  • Support for Github (yay!)
  • New landing page
  • More change filters
  • Authentication with GitLab / GitHub
  • Super simple file reverts (GitLab only right now)

Happy to hear your thoughts!

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August 29, 2021 Public demo is live πŸ₯³

πŸ‘‰ https://demo.readyforreview.com

In the last couple of days, I (finally!) had some time to work on ReadyforReview again. The most notable outcome of this is the brand new public demo of the code review tool.

Go check it out if you are interested 😊

My main goal for the demo was to offer a hassle-free way to test the product, as screenshots can only tell you so much.
I intentionally made it so that you don't even have to sign up for the site, simply login and check it out.

Important: If you give it a try and have some thoughts (good or bad), let me know! πŸ“©

9 Comments

  1. 2

    Nice work @danielv !

    1. 1

      Thank you, @iacovos πŸ™Œ

  2. 2

    Hi @danielv!

    I really like the idea of your product, as I do a lot of code reviews as well. I just found a little bug in the demo: when you de-select all file filters, except for "deleted (1)", no file is showing up. When I select only "config (1)" the "gitlab-ci.yml" shows up. But I guess that shouldn't be hard for you to track down and fix.

    After I opened the deleted file, I only got one file show in the preview pane, even when I select an edited file. Reloading the browser tab did solve the issue.

    Currently I'm missing at least three features:

    1. make annotations/comments in the changed file
    2. directly jump to the next change in the file
    3. mark the file as reviewed

    But I really like the idea and I'm eager to see any progress. This tool could be pretty helpful!

    Best,
    Sven

    1. 1

      Thanks a lot for writing down your feedback, Sven! @svzi It is very much appreciated!

      Regarding your points:

      • You actually can comment right now πŸ™‚ Simply select a code region (in the new file) and press 'c' on your keyboard. (There is actually a hint about this, it's just not shown due to some technical details in the demo. I'll fix this). Let me know if this works as expected and if you'd prefer this to work differently.

      • There is indeed a bug with the file contents for certain scenarios (= files that no longer exist on the target branch of the merge). I'll fix this.

      • "directly jump to the next change in the file" - Good point! I put it only my list.

      • "mark the file as reviewed" - yeah, this is also something I really miss. Probably the next thing I tackle, this ought to be quite useful.

      Again, thanks for sharing your thoughts! It's very motivating to hear back from fellow indie hackers 🍻

      Cheers,
      Daniel

      1. 1

        I appreciate that you share your tool with us and that you're open for feedback, Daniel @danielv !

        • Regarding "comments": Maybe you could improve the UI regarding the comment's a little bit. I'm used to the GitLab merge requests. I only need to hover the line number and a little chat bubble appears (suggesting that I can make a comment). That was something I did expect. From my point of view, it would be very helpful to re-use as much as possible from the UI the user is already used to. And for sure, extend it to the better. Also it's hard to guess that I need to click the line number and not the line itself. Because doing the latter, I only get a message saying "Cannot edit in read-only mode" (or something like that). Another thing I like more in the GitLab UI itself: the comment box is a text area and not just a text input. Your's is suggesting me to keep my comment short. But that's not what I always want to. Often times I review code from some junior devs and I like to explain what they should change and why they should. That's not something I would like to do in a single line text input...
        • Regarding "directly jump to the next change in the file": That's something I like from my VS Code setup when comparing diffs.
        • Regarding "mark the file as reviewed": Great!

        Another thing I really like about what you build is the ability to host your own instance via Docker. Do you plan to keep that possibility? Any plans to open source your project? And idea how you will monetize it? Sorry for asking so much questions, but this is really something I start to care about.

        Best,
        Sven

        1. 1
          • re. "comments": I agree, the current UI and workflow is a bit barebones and needs some love :)

          • re. shortcuts: Done βœ… I've just added the shortcuts for navigating the diff (right now works only when both files are open)

          Feel free to give it a try with the public demo (Ctrl + ⬆ or Ctrl + ⬇ ). [A hard reload of the site may be required. ]

          By the way: Alt + ⬆ or ⬇ navigates between the files .

          I really like the docker setup, too, so I'll definitely keep it.

          In terms of monetarization and/or open sourcing things: I honestly haven't thought too much about this (yet). Let's see where this is going πŸ˜‰

          Thanks again!

          1. 2

            Thanks a lot for the very quick improvements. πŸ‘

            I will definitely keep an eye on this project and I look forward to the next versions!

  3. 2

    Wow! This looks promising πŸ˜‹

    1. 1

      thanks @Abhay! 😊

January 3, 2021 Published MVP

Hi IndieHackers,

first of all, a happy new year to y'all! πŸ₯‚

I'm excited to report that I've finally published a MVP of my code review app, ReadyforReview 😊

The preview release is actually slightly more sophisticated than a "true" MVP, but it felt right to add some smaller features along the way. So it's hopefully more of a minimum likeable product right now πŸ˜‰

If you're doing code reviews in GitLab, be sure to give it a try (it's free!): https://readyforreview.com#download

Let me hear your honest thoughts!

Possible next steps:

  • Public demo (requires a little bit of extra implementation)
  • More features in the app (e.g. multi-user support and code review features)
  • rework the website (it's slightly outdated and lacks detailed feature descriptions)

Cheers!

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August 24, 2020 πŸ“« First mailing list subscriber

Today, the very first subscriber joined the mailing list for ReadyforReview, my upcoming code review tool (...not counting the courtesy signup by my wife πŸ˜‰ )

This happened despite literally zero marketing except 3 short IH posts!

I'm not gonna lie, my heart jumped a tiny bit when I saw the signup. Baby steps, I know, but it's quite motivating to see some interest.

There are more news to come tomorrow or do, so stay tuned! πŸ‘€

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August 20, 2020 Landing page is live!

In the last couple of days, I had some spare time and added a simple landing page.

To me, this is merely a trial balloon to see whether other people are interested in the tool I'm building (for myself, right now ;-) ).

I'm aware that there are many potential improvements, for example:

  • explaining the idea in more detail
  • rework the video showing the tool
  • ....

Despite that, I'm curious to hear your feedback, too!

If you are interested in the tech stack for the website, simply drop a comment!

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July 15, 2020 Working on/with my review tool

I started to implement a simple tool that supports my code reviews.

There is obviously a plethora of things you could build around this, but I'd like to start with something basic and the gradually add more features.

For now, this means that when I'm viewing a merge request in Gitlab, I can click on an injected link and see the code changes in my review tool.

I have a filterable list of file changes and can see always the individual full files (unlike in Gitlab, where you always have to scroll to a (potentially) looooong list of change snippets).

Although this is a very basic tool, I find myself actually wanting to use it. More importantly, I also feel that my code reviews (for others) already got better with my tool! 😊

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January 1, 2020 Came up with the idea for ReadyforReview

I do many code reviews as part of my day job, and I realized that I feel a lack of solid tool support for this particular task.

We work with GitLab, which offers some basic functionality to do code reviews, but doesn't work great in all situations (e.g. for larger change sets or multiple review rounds).

In my mind, there should be a tool that connects to GitLab and offers all kind of useful features to make giving/receiving code reviews as seamless as possible.

Let's see where this journey takes us ! πŸ˜‰

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About

Doing code reviews lacked solid tool support for me. This is how the idea for Codelantis was born.