Gitcolony – The next generation of pull requests | Hacker News Reader

Gitcolony – The next generation of pull requests

gitcolony.com

36 pointsmfocaraccio23 comments

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.

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.

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.

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). But unless I'm missing something, I see nothing downvote worthy here.

The site displays the screenshots small, but the image files are full-size. Until the site creators add click-to-zoom, you can see the screenshots better by right-clicking them and opening them in tabs of their own.

Thank you for your feedback, 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.

I clicked on "Sign in" which took my to Github, where I confirmed. That took me to https://www.gitcolony.com/?error=not_found. When I explicitly revisit https://www.gitcolony.com, then I am still not signed in. The "Sign in" button is still there and if I click on it I am taken to https://www.gitcolony.com/?error=not_found again.

I'm sorry that you are experiencing that issue, can you please send us an email to contact@gitcolony.com so we can try to reproduce it and help you with that? Thanks! :)

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.

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)

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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!

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".

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

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 :)

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

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 :)

> next generation of pull requests

Would that be send-email?

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!

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