Show HN: Codebrag v1.0 released - Code reviews made fun | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Codebrag v1.0 released - Code reviews made fun

codebrag.com

21 pointswozmirek16 comments

I tried signing in with Github, but the permissions your app is requesting are too liberal for the level of familiarity I have with your service.

I absolutely understand the rationale of asking for permission to view my private repositories, but you're asking for read AND WRITE permissions to my (and I assume my company's) private repos without giving any information about how you protect my or my company's closed source code.

My suggestion (being completely unfamiliar with the Github permissions API) would be to only ask for read permissions to public repos for people who get to the login page by clicking "View live demo." I understand it might limit the live demo but personally I just want to see the UI and what have you. No need for write permissions.

edit: And you're also asking for permission to read AND WRITE my email, my followers and my profile. I cannot think of any web app I would grant those kinds of permissions to my Github account. I am sure this is just a benign mistake but it could be perceived as sloppy.

Over-eager permissions like this are especially bad if you have access to private work repos. Github's oauth scopes are based solely on the public/private nature of the repo, no way to restrict access to a subset you'd actually like to use for a service.

Hey @mattdeboard,

We are aware of the issue with requesting too broad permissions. We fully understand you don't feel comfortable giving them. For the time being, if you want to login to the demo app, please use the usernames that are listed below the login screen. Any of the usernames: fox, scully, skinner. Password: codebrag.

-Maciej, Codebrag team.

We've just rolled out new version on demo.codebrag.com which asks for minimal set of permissions from Github (in fact only public infotmation). We used to ask for broader permissions as in earlier version we needed some more information from GH which is not the case anymore. Give it a try, we hope it's ok now.

Codebrag Team

I had a look at the demo, and as far as I can tell it only allows users to see the diff that's been committed rather than the change in context with the surrounding code. That's quite important when you're reviewing things in a big project. (Unless I've just misunderstood the interface... which would be a different problem.)

Aside: On the front page you're loading http://codebrag.com/stylesheets/images/screenshot.png and having the browser scale it down to 609x340. Don't do that.

Thank you for your feedback.

Yes, currently we only display commit diff. We are planning to add context view, e.g. ability to see the whole file.

From our research an ideal solution would be to perform review in an IDE, where you have the context available. However that would require supporting multiple IDEs in multiple programming languages.

It looks like this is a self-hosted solution like ReviewBoard. I was curious to know the installation requirements, specifically what language it was written in. I didn't see that on your site, and I didn't want to download it to find out. That'd be a nice thing to add to the faq.

The demo looks very nice. Slick UI, and I like the ansi/8-bit art motif! Congrats on 1.0.

Thank you!

Codebrag is based on our open-source Bootzooka project https://github.com/softwaremill/bootzooka - a quick-start base for AngularJS+Scala(tra) projects.

The technology stack is JS (AngularJS, Grunt) + Scala (Akka, Scalatra, Rogue) + MongoDB.

I wanted to try it using my Github account, but it is asking for very broad permissions. Why does it need those? For example: it wants permission to write my private email addresses.

I replied same time as you did, but I didn't even notice that they were asking for that. Once I saw "Read and Write private repos" I closed the tab.

Thank you for pointing this out. Obviously we do not need such broad permissions.

You can always use fox/codebrag and 2 other user/pass combinations listed on the login page. They do not require GitHub at all.

We've just rolled out new version on demo.codebrag.com which asks for minimal set of permissions from Github (in fact only public infotmation). Please see comment above.

Codebrag Team

I've been looking for something like this. If/When you implement contextual viewing rather then diff changes I'll probably start using it.

How exactly would you like the contextual view to present changes?

Show whole file with changed lines highlighted or as side-by-side diff? (file context) Or is it about the ability to browse/display changes e.g. by modules, directories and jump between files? (more general context)

It's cute that you can "like" a selected line, it brings a human touch to the process, but I'd add the requirement that one needs to write what they actually like about it, otherwise this option may add noise and clutter.

Good point.

We have considered this, but after some UX testing we have decided that we want to make "liking" to be as easy as possible.

That way we encourage using "likes" to make the whole code review experience more positive.

BTW It is still possible to add comment after "liking" piece of code.

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