Show HN: Merge Mamba – No more merge conflicts | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Merge Mamba – No more merge conflicts

mergemamba.com

4 pointshenryjcee8 comments

Afternoon everyone,

I've spent the last few weeks building an MVP for my first ever publicly available project and I think it's time to get it out there.

tl;dr: If you're using Github and merge conflicts are slowing your team or project down, MM can stop them before they happen. It'll keep an eye on who's working on what and let you know if there's a potential clash brewing. Free forever for open source projects and hopefully some more useful features in the pipeline!

Any and all feedback welcome and thanks for reading.

Henry

Why are merge conflicts considered a problem? They're just git asking you what the source should really look like. They can be tricky to resolve but not insurmountable.

What this really looks like is a procrastination tool so that somebody can sit back and relax when they see someone else is changing the same area in the source.

I'd love to hear why I'm wrong.

Sorry, missed your reply to this. So this came out of the experience at my previous job where we were a big team working on a rapidly changing codebase and we reckon that resolving conflicts was taking anything from 5-10 engineer hours a week.

We tried quite a few processes to reduce it and they'd all work for a few weeks but inevitably we'd revert back to old behaviour pretty fast.

On your point about it being a procrastination tool, I'd love it if my team members took a minute to stop work and converse with the others if they're working on the same bit of code! Aside from time saved fixing a potential conflict it's probably indicative that a particular bit of the system needs to be refactored. Anything that can help guide the decision to refactor is probably a force for good but we'll see. H

I see, apologies for my unnecessary hostility.

It makes sense that the tool would highlight parts of the codebase that need refactoring. I am a bit confused about what would be communicated between two engineers on a piece of code though. Would it be "hey, could you do XYZ as part of your change"? Or "hey, please don't change this piece of code until I've changed it"?

Nice idea, especially for organizations where people work with long-living branches.

I'm wondering, shouldn't you then encourage people to create the Pull Request as soon as possible? If the bot works based on PR events, it could be too late if people wait until the last minute to create it.

Interesting to hear you say that as I think you're right and making it more real-time is something I'm working on next. As you say, by the time the PR is up it's too late already but maybe a Slack/IDE notification the moment you create a conflict would be better.

Thanks again for the feedback! H

bait and switch pricing.

Valid. I definitely need to get some concrete numbers on there as saying "it'll cost ya but who knows how much or when!" is rubbish. I can at least promise that for public repos it's free forever.

Thanks, H

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