Hacker News Reader

Comment by Areibman | Hacker News Reader

The biggest grip I have with Github is the app is painfully slow. And by slow, I mean browser tab might freeze level slow.

Shockingly, the best code review tool I've ever used was Azure DevOps.

View on HN

When I worked at a Microsoft shop, I used Azure DevOps. To be honest, it's actually not bad for .NET stuff. It fits the .NET development life cycle like Visual Studio fits C#.

> The biggest grip I have with Github is the app is painfully slow. And by slow, I mean browser tab might freeze level slow.

Javascript at scale combined with teams that have to move fast and ship features is a recipe for this.

At least it's not Atlassian.

Stash (now BitBucket Server) had the best code review going, head and shoulders above GitHub to the point I thought GitHub would obviously adopt their approach. But I imagine Atlassian has now made it slow and useless like they do with all their products and acquisitions.

Bit Bucket had a git-related tool called Stash? I love Bit Bucket, but I'm glad I did not know about that.

There was a locally-hosted Git server platform called Stash. Atlassian bought it, rebranded it as "BitBucket Server" (positioned similarly to GitHub Enterprise or self-hosted GitLab) and gradually made it look and feel like BitBucket (the cloud product), even though they're actually completely separate codebases (or at least used to be).

That explains why it doesn't suck nearly as much as Jira and Confluence...

But why was it ever called Stash? The word stash has particular meaning in git, and it's been that way since a very early git version.

Stash was not an acquisition. Stash was built from the ground up inside Atlassian during its golden age, by a bunch of engineers who really cared about performance. Though it helped that they didn't have Jira's 'problem' of having 8 figures of revenue hanging off a terrible database schema designed a decade ago.

You might be thinking of Fisheye/Crucible, which were acquisitions, and suffered the traditional fate of being sidelined.

(You are 100% correct that Stash/Bitbucket Server has also been sidelined, but that has everything to do with their cloud SaaS model generating more revenue than selling self-hosted licenses. The last time I used it circa 2024, it was still way faster than Bitbucket Cloud though.)

Source: worked at Atlassian for a long time but left a few years ago.

Yeah I think I was remembering things backwards - since they put Stash under the Bitbucket organisation and branding it looked as if Bitbucket was their own product and Stash the outside acquisition, but it was actually the other way around.

which is ironic because historically the slowness of GitHub's UI was due to them not using much JS and requiring round trips for stuff like flagging a checkbox.

What did you like so much about DevOps?

I use it every day and don't have any issues with the review system, but to me it's very similar to github. If anything, I miss being able to suggest changes and have people click a button to integrate them as commits.

That suggestion feature actually exists on ADO. It was introduced in the last year or so.

Commenting feels so much better. You can comment on entire files, and you can leave review comments that actually "block" (rather than just get appended to the conversation)

I've used this 'suggestion' workflow in azure devops. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/devops/introducing-the-new-pu...

I didn't know about it at all! That looks like exactly what I wanted.

So I'm back to liking dev-ops and github code reviews identically!

Curious if you've used GitLab in anger. It is my pick of the big 4.

nit: gripe, not grip :-P

Worst part is it was alright when it was mostly static pages. With the gradual SPA rewrite it has become absolute garbage for basically no benefits.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com