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Comment by piotrkaminski | Hacker News Reader

Reviewable author here -- thanks for the compliment! Redoing the UI is on the to-do list, once the migration from Angular to Vue is done.

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Thanks for redoing the UI. While evaluating, I really loathed the childish style, and I had problems finding the buttons I need when I needed them. The UI is cluttered and not self explanatory. It was a non-starter for me. That said, reviewable has fans in my immediate surroundings, so the problems are not with the system design.

Thanks, I'll take that criticism to heart. :) Can you expand on "childish style", though? My design philosophy is best summarized as "minimalistic but with touches of whimsy", but perhaps that comes across as childish?

Thank you for putting it together! I switched folks over and we've been paying customers for well over a year now. I can overlook the UI deficiencies when I have proper review workflow, but the problem is that people who don't know the Critique workflow might be put off by the UI. Personally, I encourage them to give Reviewable a good try anyway. Anything larger than a few dozen lines and/or needing multiple rounds of feedback is just untenable in plain GitHub. I can say with certainty, our code would be worse if it wasn't for Reviewable.

Thanks again, I might have to quote you on the home page. :) And yes, the UI is often the sticking point for adoption. I don't know if it's just the style / toolkit (an old version of Semantic UI) and switching to something like Material Design would take care of the problem, or if it's a deeper design / UX issue. A good onboarding flow would likely help as well but I haven't figure out what that should look like yet either. More feedback and advice is always appreciated -- and if you happen to be (or know) a UX expert who knows how to fix it I do have some budget I could throw that way. :)

From my brief play with your demo it's a bit of both.

The toolkit is very small and lacks good definition of elements (both visually in that it lacks contrast, and practically in that I have no idea what is clickable or editable).

The page structure isn't that clear either, where are the column headings? And on my widescreen browser window the isn't a limit on horizontal stretch - I have to play with the browser to find a good width. Also, I can expand code, but how do I shrink/hide it?

Thanks! Sounds like switching toolkits should address many of these issues.

And no, you can't shrink/hide code, other than by re-diffing. What can I say -- it's surprisingly hard to implement and didn't seem worth it.

Will you guys support bitbucket ? Some of your older comments/support bugs have refused to support anything other than GitHub.

Sorry, not going to happen as things stand. A big part of Reviewable's attraction is the tight GitHub integration, so supporting other platforms (BitBucket, GitLab) would essentially require a fork or some pretty heavy-duty abstractions. Either way, future maintenance would become much harder, so I can't build a business case for it. Perhaps if BitBucket or GitLab were larger / growing faster, or if Reviewable was a much larger company with many developers to throw at the problem...

BitBucket doesn't have a large OSS community, but it does have a lot of larger business that need Jira and Confluence integration. So it could be worth it, just the user base isn't as visible as GH.

Definitely something to think about then, since I think larger businesses are the sweet spot for Reviewable and that's where most of the growth has been coming from in the last couple years. Still, forking the codebase _really_ doesn't sound appealing...

Abstractions are sometimes really good for understanding the business. But yeah comes with a price tag and potential mismatch to the real niche (like GitHub add on)

BTW, does anyone where to get better-than-anecdotal data on userbase size and composition for GitHub, BitBucket, and GitLab? And, ideally, growth trends?

Community Advocate for GitLab here. We can't share that data publicly (also because it's hard to track since many are on open source core), but we do have over 100k orgs using GitLab

So answering myself, with numbers pulled from https://expandedramblings.com:

GitHub: 31M users

BitBucket: 6M users, 1M orgs

GitLab: 100K orgs

The GitLab number tallies with Emily's answer, which gives me some moderate confidence that these numbers are in the right neighborhood. I'm also going to assume that the users-vs-teams numbers are all in roughly the same proportion.

Based one these numbers it doesn't make much sense to target BitBucket unless either 1) they're growing much faster than GitHub (unlikely) or 2) their customers are a much better fit for Reviewable (possible, but it would have to be a truly significant difference in userbase composition). Targeting GitLab doesn't appear to make sense at all (as a business), though perhaps they're growing fast.

I'd go off of the BitBucket plugin install counts and compare them to what you're getting on GH:

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/addons/app/bitbucket/top-s...

It's hard to compare, since Reviewable is an OAuth app and hence needs an install per-user rather than per-org. However, on the page you linked I see a couple apps topping out at 6-7k installs, and most of the rest are in the low hundreds. This doesn't look particularly impressive to me...

"edoing the UI is on the to-do list, once the migration from Angular to Vue is done."

Is what makes me uncomfortable about modern webdev. Valuable product work constantly deprioritized by migrations to new frameworks. Magpieing has always been a risk in hobby projects, but in the past there was a smaller torrent of nee things to always be migrating to.

That doesn't seem particularly different that desktop software. Pretend s/he said that once they got to off of WinForms and onto WPF they could iterate on the UI design. or maybe once they upgraded GTK, or whatever.

Eh, I don't think it's as bad as you make it sound. It's not "constantly", it's the first major migration effort for Reviewable. And honestly, I probably could've stayed with Angular 1.x for a few more years (it's still being developed, after all), I just got tired of working around its performance issues. There's also 4 years of learning how best to architect an application like this that led to the creation of a Firebase-centric model layer where Vue happened to be a good platform to build on. And even if we didn't switch platforms, a thorough refactoring would've been necessary after many years of accumulated technical debt.

Do you've experience with Google critique? Did you work there in past or something? How did you copy their features without seeing their product?

I worked at Google ~2006-2012. Most of my experience was with Mondrian, but Critique was coming online shortly before I left. I used it long enough that the general "feeling" of using it stayed with me, but not long enough that I actually remembered specific features to copy -- especially since I didn't start even thinking about Reviewable until ~2014. So really it's more of a "spiritual ancestor". :)

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