alt Hacker NewsI often think about how I’d do it if I ran my own company.
I would really like to see what it would be like doing all code reviews over email. The repo would just be a simple vps-style server with git-only ssh access, there’d be a particular for-review/ branch namespace for code to be reviewed, and CI would just be a bot waiting for branches to show up and would mark refs as good or not by just annotating/tagging them. It could reply in the email thread with results too.
The mailing list would have a web archive viewer, naturally. That’s how you could look at old reviews. There’s tons of existing solutions for this, and it’s just html.
Chat would be on IRC with bots to archive the channels. Easy as hell.
The whole thing (except maybe the CI runners which need beefier hardware) could be done on a very cheap server.
GitHub is waaay over engineered for what you need to run a software project. Look at the Linux kernel, they just use a simple mailing list, and it’s debatably the most successful software project of all time.
Issue/bug tracking is scarier though. Because I’d probably want to yak shave my own solution and get too involved with that and not even focus on what the company does. Maybe it could be a bug tracking software company?
Ideally I would want the code review to be versioned as well with easily accessible history. That is, I would like to see the exact lines which a comment pertains to and when they were changed and switch back and forth. While e-mail is probably good enough as a protocol to exchange this data, the e-mail client is not a good way to view it in my opinion. Maybe we need a decentralised code review system as well.