

Ask HN: feedback on an idea - code reviews site - andrewstuart

How bout a website where people do code reviews?  For example a development team posts their code each day and others comment on it.  This is not StackOverflow questions and answers - it's code reviews, suggesting problems, bugs, improvements, better ways of doing things.<p>I'd be happy to pay to have great developers comment and make suggestions on my code - better, more reliable, more secure code - that has a tangible value to me.<p>Maybe www.codiscussion.com (get it - discussion about code?)<p>Could this be a commercially viable idea?
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vitovito
I think there's a difference between a community site for code reviews, and a
commercially viable hosted code review service.

For the former, I think that's a great idea. Last year I tossed around the
idea of hosting Drupal code review meetups, where code to review would be
submitted ahead of time with notes, then walked through live and the attendees
(who would presumably have made notes prior to arriving) would comment on it.
People who had code reviews in previous meetings would return to present their
changes, comparing and contrasting.

The tricky situation with code reviews by people who are unfamiliar with your
project is there's a lot of context that they lose out on. A jack-of-all-
trades programmer is only going to be able to discuss broad technical
constructs and algorithms. An expert PHP language programmer is going to be
able to contribute more specifically. But only an expert Drupal developer is
going to have enough context to really significantly improve your code, second
only to someone familiar with your codebase's internals. You just have to know
what you want to get out of the reviews.

As for a commercially-viable reviewing service, I'd wonder what sort of
developers you'd have doing your reviews. I ran a developer relations team for
a few years and we needed to hire serious, top-tier developers (and pay them
top tier rates) to really get the kind of in-depth understanding and support
equivalent to the original engineers. We spend easily a man-day across 2-3
developers for each code review we do, sometimes longer. That's going to be
expensive.

In addition, I'd be concerned as to why your customers were using your
service. If it's a form of "sign-off" or "best practices" review, an impartial
third party before a delivery from a consultant to a client, I'd be worried
for the reputation of your service. I've hired developers and put their code
through code review and we all said it looks pretty good but it wouldn't
actually run or perform as advertised. If a shady consultant got your service
to say they were great, but it turned out their client was scammed, the client
may come calling for you.

Finally, we use Smart Bear Code Collaborator. It's not bad, but it's not
perfect. Maybe an MVP is simply cleaning up something like Rietveld and
competing with it or Kiln as a hosted service, first.

Good luck!

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ScottWhigham
I'm trying to figure out how the scheduling would work. Let's say I have a dev
team of five people and we decide to do what you've suggested. We work today
from 10AM-8PM. Here's where I have an issue: do we (or "do you expect people
to") wait to code more until we've received feedback? Or do we keep coding
without waiting?

If it's the former, then are there going to be enough quality code reviewers
from 8:01PM - 9:59AM so that our workflow wouldn't be affected? It most
certainly would require a bunch of mostly-overseas coders to review code
during those hours. That means to make this "work" you need global marketing -
not impossible, just more work.

If it's the latter, then I wonder what people will do when a comment is posted
on code that is 7 days old? Many times I've written lines and lines of unit
tests, integrated the code into many different areas, and moved on into
another area/module. A minor refactoring would take us out of our current
workflow and be costly. A major refactoring may cause us to delay launch. If
the refactoring is high quality it would be worth it. So the key here is
finding code reviewers who contribute high quality refactoring ideas.

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malmros
Yes! May have some "disclosure" issues...

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andrewstuart
Some projects we're not much concerned about the source code being secret. I'd
rather it be good than secret.

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mw63214
github?

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andrewstuart
Is github a service to provide code reviews?

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mw63214
<https://github.com/>

~~~
andrewstuart
Not sure I understand - github is a revision control system, not a site where
I can request that my code be reviewed.

