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How's My Code? A simple, lightweight code review tool for distributed teams. (howsmycode.com)
68 points by bensummers on Dec 1, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 27 comments


Sweet. I'm one of the developers :)

Regrettably, the site is moving really slowly. We made this for the Rails Rumble earlier this year, in 48 hours. After that, very little time was devoted to the site, since our "real" jobs keep getting us from hacking on this.

If you have any ideas, however, I would encourage you to go and add them to our support system, at http://help.howsmycode.com -- we don't promise to get them implemented right away, but we will look at them :)


Please, forgive me the off-topic (and pedantic) remark, but the extra apostrophe in "What other's are saying", on the site's front page, bothers my grammatical OCD.


Ugh, sorry, that totally passed me. It's fixed and will be up on our next deploy. And I totally support your pedantic off-topic remark, so no worries :)


Not that they shouldn't fix the apostrophe, but, and I'm writing this as a compliment to the team vs a rebuttal to your grammatical complaint; the entire dev team is in Uruguay and all speak nearly perfect English; not a single one is a native English speaker... i for one am impressed and humbled by their total grasp of the language as i try to learn Spanish...


Very cool tool, but I don't like how it automatically marks commits using the repo owner's email address as read. It prevents other people from reviewing code that I write :/ not sure if they've fixed this or not.


It marks your commit as read to you (ie, it marks commits by email "A" as read to the user who signs in with email "A").

Other people in your team should see them as unread until they actually go and open the diffs.


Oh! Okay, well that's good. Thanks for the answer!


I've fallen in love with gerrit for code reviews. Gerrit lets me set up an automerge to the "main trunk" of the development if one person claims it works and two people eyeball the code. It's not a setup for everyone, but for my teams it's been absolutely brilliant.

If you supported auto-merging based on review criteria (preferably a functional test in addition to a code review requirement) I would switch in a heartbeat. Without that, I'll never even look at it.


I'm somewhat bewildered why you require users to provide their real names. I also notice "thou shalt not block our ads" in your TOS. It's understandable from your perspective, but surely a negative from the user's perspective. Note that Opera installs with ad blocking on by default (if I'm not mistaken).

You could use an explicit "Dashboard" button someplace, because otherwise the layout is a bit disorienting after adding your first repo, then wondering how to get back to "that first screen". (I eventually figured that out.)

Otherwise, this seems like a good tool for teams. Good job.


If I'm building an ad-supported site, I don't care about users who unconditionally block ads. Those users clearly don't care about the people who make the sites they're using.


It's not about caring .. It's about how you want to experience the internet.

Would you rather have clear, readable content or be besieged by advertising ..

On sites target devs you should really expect very high % to be using ad blockers ... I'm yet to meet a single dev that doesn't use it in some form.

(edit: I didn't even realise it was ad supported for that reason .. still think its a good service though )


That's beyond silly thinking. I wouldn't click on Ads even if I didn't have Adblock on. I mentally block them out. That means I don't care about the site. Silly silly.


Our TOS says that!? Silly TOS... we use adblockers ourselves.


Very cool. If I saw a piece of code in a commit that was bad, is there an easy way to post the updated code in the comment? Maybe also use diffs, gist, etc... and have renditions that can be accepted and auto-merged. Just thinking aloud :) Great job guys!


Nice you guys are liking the tool! I'm another one of howsmycode's developers. As Foca said, please let us know your suggestions in out support system: http://help.howsmycode.com/


that is a really nice idea... signing up and lets see how it works..


hmm, not to sure about automatically showing all commits .. the repo just imported has 4739 and growing, with only mine being marked as reviewed thats alot of initial reading

How about an option on import like "mark all as read" otherwise i see people with massive git projects having a moan.

edited to add idea..


would be nice to be able to somehow mark all existing commits on import as reviewed. not going to review every commit for the last year!


Hah, actually we have this committed, and will be up on the next push. In any case, we only show the last 5 days of unreviewed changes after an initial import.


seems like it marks older ones as reviewed actually. I only get about a page of unreviewed ones


can't find the demo.


Holy shit, the guy in the screencast has over 18000 unread messages in his gmail inbox!


Yeah, i'm not so good at keeping ton top of my inbox. You always hear folks talking about a 0 inbox, but nobody brags about 18,000 unreads.


It's just a small thing but I think doing a screencast when you're having a cold kind of puts people off. It made me think there was snot on the keyboard.


I agree, and I know it sounds negative, but I couldn't make it through the whole screencast. For me, it was too distracting.


Yeah, we should definitely redo the screencast. That one was done after 48 hours of not sleeping and hacking to finish up the rails rumble.


Totally understandable.




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