Beyond Review Comments: Building a Friendlier Code Review Process with Code Reactions

Code Reactions 🚀💩
We welcome all ideas and contributions on GitHub 💚!

Install extension →

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TL;DR

We created a vscode extension to add emoji reactions, even 

with comments, to any line of code of any Git repo! React and 

see others reactions to any piece of code straight from your

IDE, and have them follow (or not 😉) the code through 
changes.

The story behind

After almost a decade of writing code in all sorts of environments, in a small startup or in a big enterprise with thousands of developers, we always felt that there were some things that should be alongside our code, but never could be.

1. Giving and receiving feedback for your code. As developers we learn from others, and their reaction to our code either that being a 👍, 👎 or sometimes even a 💩 or a 🚀, is invaluable to our progress. Unfortunately, apart from reviews we don't really get the chance to tell someone what we think about their code.

2. Putting a mark or a note in the code. You are going about your task and suddenly you notice a piece of code that has that smell, or just doesn't look right, or is outdated, or uses an old syntax, or looks like it could even be an issue. Now your choices are:

   1. Drop the task you are doing and fix it
   2. Create an issue somewhere to come back to it at another time (or forever forget)
   3. Do it with your task (ouch!)
   4. Leaving a comment in the code and puzzling yourself a few months down the line, when the code has moved/changed, with the quiz "what was I referring to here".

3. Code quality metrics are very cool as a concept! However once used we all know that they feel a bit neither here nor there. Eg is a code bad if it has high complexity? Maybe, maybe not! I'd like to know what my collaborators thinks of the code, which parts are for a 😍 and which for a 🤔 and which repos and files are the ones that might need a look into cause 💩 has started pilling on.

That's why we wanted to make something that's:

• Open Source 💚 (share the love!)
• It works in the IDE
• You can add emojis and comments 🚀
• You can see others emojis and comments 👀
• Follows (or leaves) the code as it changes

What we built

We built an IDE extension (vscode only for the time being,
Intellij is in the works) that allows you to add emoji
reactions, even with comments, to any line of code of any Git
repo!

You can react and see others reactions to any piece of code straight from your IDE!

And Reactions follow the code!, meaning that it stays there for as long as the relevant line has not changed - whitespace doesn't count as change - and they get removed from the line when it's changed.

This is the first version, so it supports limited amount of emojis for now, and it has only a few features. We are super excited to have the community shape the tool and decide on the new features by contributing on GitHub

Features

• Different ways to see reactions and add yours (status bar, inline decoration, annotations, reactions feed panel)
• Notifications on new reactions (either on the repo or specifically on your lines)
• We didn't want to bloat the IDE, so we created a lightweight website for all the views we didn't feel belonged in the IDE (ie cross-repo data) so you are able to get information for all your projects.

Future features

We are super excited to have your input on GitHub to help us shape the future of this extension with what the community wants and needs!

AdadotTeam / vscode-reactions

Add and see other's reactions to your code!

Code Reactions — Emoji reactions for any Git repo

Add emoji reactions, even with comments, to any Git repo! React and see others reactions to any piece of code straight from your IDE.

Code Reactions is an open-source extension for Visual Studio Code, made by our team at Adadot with a mind to give back to the community.

You saw some nice piece of code? Now you can add a 👍, or maybe even a 😍 and spread the love.

It seems like there might be a bug there? Give it a 🐛 with a comment on your finding 
and come back to fix it when you get the chance.

This code feels like it has quite a smell... You think it might justify a 💩? Leave it there 
and bring the team around to help you scoop all of these.

We give you the ability to react to any…

View on GitHub

Comments

[Jake Lundberg]

Love this idea! So frequently text is read with the wrong tone, and messages are often taken wrong. We can ask everyone to assume positive intent all day long, but it doesn’t seem to happen as much as we’d like. Adding emojis to text could really help with this! I look forward to checking this out!!!

[Alex Harris]

This is a great point, especially for multi-lingual or distributed project where English might not be native tongue for everyone.

[galwhocod3z]

This is awesome :)

[Alex Harris]

Thank you for your kind words!

[Chirag Aggarwal]

Looks like a really useful tool for large teams working with vs code. Excited to check it out. Great article 🎉

[Alex Harris]

Glad you liked it!

[Nevo David]

Great article Alex!
Thank you for posting!

[Alex Harris]

Thank you, really appreciate it!

[Miko]

wow, really interesting! I can see this being really useful for large, fast-moving teams. If you have any testimonials or experiences from teams using this, I'd love to read them.

Thanks for posting!

[Alex Harris]

Thank you so much for your positive comment, the tool is brand new but we are launching on Product Hunt next week and hopefully collect some reviews off the back of that. The early (verbal) response that we get is that people love the ease of giving more context to their feedback on code