
Gitcolony – The next generation of pull requests - mfocaraccio
http://gitcolony.com
======
caio1982
Uh, "request a demo"? I was expecting a little bit more of juicy info in those
pages after reading some bold statements. I can't sign up either (even if you
tell me in green letters no credit card is required), sorry. You should have
just provided maybe a better overview of the service in the landing page.
Dunno, maybe a full-featured video of the revolutionary features described
there. I really think a nice detailed video of the unique features of the
service would be great to have. It's hard to visualize what you mean with
those static screenshots and text.

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MichaelGG
Yep, I immediately went to see some screens, and all they have are these tiny
little things that don't let me see anything. Looks like there's a nice
design, but that's it. I can understand that doing a video takes more time,
but a nice screenshot tour should be doable. Or even making the current shots
clickable to zoom.

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mfocaraccio
Thank you for your feedback and nice words about the design. As I said in the
previous comment, we will work on that video and will keep you posted about
it! :)

Meanwhile, feel free to create a free account, I would love to hear your
feedback.

~~~
hliyan
Is someone maliciously downvoting OP's comments? Granted a few of them don't
say much more than "thanks, will keep you posted" and OP has made 5 HN
submissions on Gitcolony over a year
([https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=gitcolony.com](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=gitcolony.com)).
But unless I'm missing something, I see nothing downvote worthy here.

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hliyan
It looks great! One minor problem though. Once I'm signed on, I can't seem to
access the Gitcolony home page again (to see pricing etc.) -- I always get
redirected to the dashboard.

P.S. I totally agree with this quote:

    
    
       Ask a programmer to review 10 lines of code, he'll find 10 issues. 
       Ask him to do 500 lines and he'll say it looks good.

~~~
mfocaraccio
Thank you for the nice words! Yeah, that's intentionally, but we can
definitely improve that! (Meanwhile you can enter using this url
[http://gitcolony.com/pricing](http://gitcolony.com/pricing))

That one is a great quote, isn't it? :)

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apinstein
We hit the edges of GitHub pull request productivity a while back. It's really
painful for large complicated code reviews that raise issues. Was impossible
to quickly review code and have confidence all raised issues were addressed.

Been using Reviewable for the last few weeks and it's been really great at
addressing these issues. Worth checking out, and I will check this one out
too.

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gkop
Looks like a hosting-agnostic solution somewhere between the opinionation of
GitHub and the flexibility of Gerrit? I could see this taking off. GitHub is
too opinionated and over-simplified for the tastes of some, while Gerrit is
much more powerful but also showing its age.

~~~
mfocaraccio
That's definitely the idea! We want to run on top of Github/other git hosting
solutions to be able to setup your own rules while being more flexible and
better than Gerrit (we think that the commit by commit approach it's
definitely not the most efficient one).

Since GitHub started to grow, pull requests became very popular for open
source contributions. Now, companies are also using them to reinforce their
internal code review process. We think this can work even better by building
the next generation of pull requests, helping companies to improve their
process.

~~~
gkop
My advice is to absolutely nail the abstraction layer between CI and code
review. Remember that the most valuable software often has large build
matrices and necessarily complicated code review <> CI workflows.
Gerrit+Jenkins is actually surprisingly limited in these regards.
GitHub+[Circle,Travis] delivers surprisingly close to the same level of
flexibility here as Gerrit+Jenkins.

~~~
mfocaraccio
Super interesting feedback, I super appreciate it :) Actually we are working
now to manage the whole merge process and then CI + code review is our next
item to tackle.

I will keep you posted about our progress!

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Chimp2000
When I first saw the name, I mistakenly read it as "Gitcolonoscopy".

For those who don't know, a colonoscopy is a medical procedure wherein a tube-
like camera is inserted into a patient's anus, rectum and bowels, in order for
a doctor to view areas that are otherwise difficult to view.

It isn't the best imagery to accidentally associate with a software product,
I'm afraid!

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miah_
copy suggestion:

"Ask a programmer to review 10 lines of code, they'll find 10 issues. Ask them
to review 500 lines and they'll say it looks good".

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timr
What does "live branches" mean? It isn't clear from the descripton on the
site, and there's no further information...

~~~
mfocaraccio
Our fault, we need to update that name to "Virtual Pull Requests" (we renamed
them on our last release).

The main idea is that you can have a "virtual" pull request since the moment
you create the branch (you can set up to get it done automatically by
Gitcolony). Basically, you have a PR before you even create a pull request,
but it's just virtual because it doesn't exist on Github, it only exists
within the boundaries of Gitcolony.

This makes visible your work so your team can review it from the get go,
without the risk of merging it by mistake.

And whenever you want, you can convert it to a traditional PR just with one
click :)

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toadkicker
"Code as its written" fine for collaborators, bad for over zealous managers.

~~~
mfocaraccio
Interesting debate! We want to improve the code review process for
collaborators. If we improve that process for collaborators, in the long term
it will be better also for managers :)

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J_Darnley
> next generation of pull requests

Would that be send-email?

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mfocaraccio
No it's not :) In fact, we know that devs don't like emails, so we manage
everything from our tool (plus integrations with Slack & Hipchat).

In addition, we know that emails don't work, so we want to create actionable
items directly from Gitcolony, no more emails with a list of things to
improve. Just create your TODOs and tickets while you review your code and
notify those users that need to be involved!

