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I am the person who wrote this. AMA EDIT: Also, I'm not sure if this is against the rules, but I also need a new job as of recently. I like working on dev tool

by aseipp 2y ago

I am the person who wrote this. AMA EDIT: Also, I'm not sure if this is against the rules, but I also need a new job as of recently. I like working on dev tools and other hard problems. If you liked reading this, want me to make your dev team more productive, or just want to experience and enjoy my excellent (and occasionally eclectic) taste, the email is in my profile.

rosmax_1337 2y ago
What is the meaning of life?
- aseipp 2y ago
  I know this is in jest, but I'll just take the opportunity to respond by posting my favorite poem. The relationship between it and your question -- well, that's for you to decide. The birds have vanished down the sky. Now the last cloud drains away. We sit together, the mountain and me, until only the mountain remains. -- Zazen on Ching-t’ing Mountain
  - xelxebar 2y ago
    Beautiful. I wasn't aware of Li Bai (李白). Took a bit of searching, but the original looks to be called 独坐敬亭山: 獨坐敬亭山衆鳥高飛盡孤雲獨去閒相看兩不厭只有敬亭山 This is gorgeous. Thank you for sharing!
  - rosmax_1337 2y ago
    The question was sincere yet playful. I appreciate your answer. Here's a poem I like. O'er all the hilltops Is quiet now, In all the treetops Hearest thou Hardly a breath; The birds are asleep in the trees: Wait, soon like these Thou too shalt rest. -- Wanderer's Nightsong II, Goethe
zeotroph 2y ago
From my interaction with the free part of GitHub, "diff soup" describes it very well. Does the paid version do anything better? What about GitLab, can this get near Gerrit? And then there are the external services which try to make GitHub less painful (and quite pricey, especially compared to a selfhosted Gerrit), by providing stacked diff support, did you look at these?
- aseipp 2y ago
  No, paying for GH doesn't make the code review experience any better. It's identical across public/cloud/enterprise GH. I do not know if GitLab does anything different; I've never used it in anger. I'd bet $10 the answer is "no, it's basically just the same as GitHub", though. If you want a service that adds stacking on top of GitHub, my conclusion after some research is that https://graphite.dev/ https://graphite.dev/ is the best option. We did consider it, but it couldn't work in my last job for "reasons" (see my other replies in this thread) but if you've got a shop of Git users and just want to throw money at the problem, I think it's the best choice. GerritHub is also a possibility, they employ many of the Gerrit devs and know what they're doing, but holy shit the corporate options are expensive out of the gate. It's like $20k/yr minimum regardless of size or number of users. Honestly, Graphite is cheap as hell considering how much more productive your engineers can be with a good review tool. Gerrit was basically night and day for us. It's not "oh, it pays for itself really quickly in a few days!" You'd probably pay off the monthly cost in less than an hour of actual code review. And you don't even have to opt most of your engineers in; you can trial it where 90% of them use GH and only a subset use graphite and pay.
  - zeotroph 2y ago
    Right, for Graphite $20/dev/month is nothing (I wonder if Enterprise is less or more more than that...), considering an ounce of review (prevention) is worth a pound of bugfixes (cure). And when you can not get corporate to switch away from GH, then that is it. In hindsight an obvious way to (almost) print money, congratulations, but also a sad state of affairs. But I imagine the $20k/yr is something you can easily spend on a 1/5 of a dev doing Gerrit maintenance.
  - fHr 2y ago
    Never going to understand those finance teams who think like 20k/yr for any enterprise deal is a good deal to onboard more customers and increase reach.
    - sureglymop 2y ago
      Because they don't need that much reach if even a single customer nets them 20k/yr.
torarnv 2y ago
Amazing summary of the mental model of the interdiff review style, and the problems with GitHub's approach to code review. Thank you! One thing you don't touch upon (yet) is that the diff soup may lead people to prefer the squash merge strategy, to get rid of the "noise" of the fixup commits, which throws away the "good" initial 3 atomic commits as well. With interdiff review style you're left with the initial 3 commits, and the choice of whether to land them individually or squash them is based entirely on the commits themselves and how atomic they really are.
dijksterhuis 2y ago
What do you think of GitLab set up with Merge Request Dependencies + Squash+Merge merge strategy? I remember it being pretty easy to have that series of MRs pattern set up. On merging 3x MRs it would be 3x merge commits w/ a single squash commit for each. Regardless of the MR’s commit history. Tradeoffs are having to merge earlier series branches into later series branches after changes are made during review. But people can do what they want to the commit history during review. Don’t matter as it just gets squashed. Been a while since I’ve done this mind, been slumming it with GitHub so I might be looking at it with rose tinted sunglasses.
- cormacrelf 2y ago
  Maybe it’s better selfhosted, but GitLab is almost unbearably slow. I booted up a Gerrit instance to compare and simply rendering a MR page is maybe 10 seconds vs zero. GitHub is still 10x faster. GitLab manages to be almost that slow for cached pages, making you wait, then realise it’s outdated, and load again, totalling maybe 20 seconds just to “go back to the MR list”. Its awful. Whatever it is you think you might like about GitLab in theory, it’s much worse when this is your reality. When it takes that long to render a single MR, you do not want to be creating more of them than you have to, and you certainly don’t want to make yourself and the rest of your team navigate between MRs to do code review.
another-acct 2y ago
> or just want to experience and enjoy my excellent (and occasionally eclectic) taste Thanks for the good laugh :) Seriously though, your CV is impressive. I hope you'll land well, and quickly. In my (very recent) job hunt experience, the job market is currently mortally ill; the more senior and experienced you are, the more the insane interviewing and HR practices, and the inexplicable rejections, will hurt your soul. A friend of mine sent me the following links: https://danluu.com/hiring-lemons/ https://danluu.com/hiring-lemons/ https://danluu.com/programmer-moneyball/ https://danluu.com/programmer-moneyball/ https://danluu.com/algorithms-interviews/ https://danluu.com/algorithms-interviews/ Good luck!

by aseipp 2y ago

rosmax_1337 2y ago

What is the meaning of life?

aseipp 2y ago
I know this is in jest, but I'll just take the opportunity to respond by posting my favorite poem. The relationship between it and your question -- well, that's for you to decide. The birds have vanished down the sky. Now the last cloud drains away. We sit together, the mountain and me, until only the mountain remains. -- Zazen on Ching-t’ing Mountain
- xelxebar 2y ago
  Beautiful. I wasn't aware of Li Bai (李白). Took a bit of searching, but the original looks to be called 独坐敬亭山: 獨坐敬亭山衆鳥高飛盡孤雲獨去閒相看兩不厭只有敬亭山 This is gorgeous. Thank you for sharing!
- rosmax_1337 2y ago
  The question was sincere yet playful. I appreciate your answer. Here's a poem I like. O'er all the hilltops Is quiet now, In all the treetops Hearest thou Hardly a breath; The birds are asleep in the trees: Wait, soon like these Thou too shalt rest. -- Wanderer's Nightsong II, Goethe

zeotroph 2y ago

From my interaction with the free part of GitHub, "diff soup" describes it very well. Does the paid version do anything better? What about GitLab, can this get near Gerrit? And then there are the external services which try to make GitHub less painful (and quite pricey, especially compared to a selfhosted Gerrit), by providing stacked diff support, did you look at these?

aseipp 2y ago
No, paying for GH doesn't make the code review experience any better. It's identical across public/cloud/enterprise GH. I do not know if GitLab does anything different; I've never used it in anger. I'd bet $10 the answer is "no, it's basically just the same as GitHub", though. If you want a service that adds stacking on top of GitHub, my conclusion after some research is that https://graphite.dev/ https://graphite.dev/ is the best option. We did consider it, but it couldn't work in my last job for "reasons" (see my other replies in this thread) but if you've got a shop of Git users and just want to throw money at the problem, I think it's the best choice. GerritHub is also a possibility, they employ many of the Gerrit devs and know what they're doing, but holy shit the corporate options are expensive out of the gate. It's like $20k/yr minimum regardless of size or number of users. Honestly, Graphite is cheap as hell considering how much more productive your engineers can be with a good review tool. Gerrit was basically night and day for us. It's not "oh, it pays for itself really quickly in a few days!" You'd probably pay off the monthly cost in less than an hour of actual code review. And you don't even have to opt most of your engineers in; you can trial it where 90% of them use GH and only a subset use graphite and pay.
- zeotroph 2y ago
  Right, for Graphite $20/dev/month is nothing (I wonder if Enterprise is less or more more than that...), considering an ounce of review (prevention) is worth a pound of bugfixes (cure). And when you can not get corporate to switch away from GH, then that is it. In hindsight an obvious way to (almost) print money, congratulations, but also a sad state of affairs. But I imagine the $20k/yr is something you can easily spend on a 1/5 of a dev doing Gerrit maintenance.
- fHr 2y ago
  Never going to understand those finance teams who think like 20k/yr for any enterprise deal is a good deal to onboard more customers and increase reach.
  - sureglymop 2y ago
    Because they don't need that much reach if even a single customer nets them 20k/yr.

torarnv 2y ago

Amazing summary of the mental model of the interdiff review style, and the problems with GitHub's approach to code review. Thank you! One thing you don't touch upon (yet) is that the diff soup may lead people to prefer the squash merge strategy, to get rid of the "noise" of the fixup commits, which throws away the "good" initial 3 atomic commits as well. With interdiff review style you're left with the initial 3 commits, and the choice of whether to land them individually or squash them is based entirely on the commits themselves and how atomic they really are.

dijksterhuis 2y ago

What do you think of GitLab set up with Merge Request Dependencies + Squash+Merge merge strategy? I remember it being pretty easy to have that series of MRs pattern set up. On merging 3x MRs it would be 3x merge commits w/ a single squash commit for each. Regardless of the MR’s commit history. Tradeoffs are having to merge earlier series branches into later series branches after changes are made during review. But people can do what they want to the commit history during review. Don’t matter as it just gets squashed. Been a while since I’ve done this mind, been slumming it with GitHub so I might be looking at it with rose tinted sunglasses.

cormacrelf 2y ago
Maybe it’s better selfhosted, but GitLab is almost unbearably slow. I booted up a Gerrit instance to compare and simply rendering a MR page is maybe 10 seconds vs zero. GitHub is still 10x faster. GitLab manages to be almost that slow for cached pages, making you wait, then realise it’s outdated, and load again, totalling maybe 20 seconds just to “go back to the MR list”. Its awful. Whatever it is you think you might like about GitLab in theory, it’s much worse when this is your reality. When it takes that long to render a single MR, you do not want to be creating more of them than you have to, and you certainly don’t want to make yourself and the rest of your team navigate between MRs to do code review.

another-acct 2y ago

> or just want to experience and enjoy my excellent (and occasionally eclectic) taste Thanks for the good laugh :) Seriously though, your CV is impressive. I hope you'll land well, and quickly. In my (very recent) job hunt experience, the job market is currently mortally ill; the more senior and experienced you are, the more the insane interviewing and HR practices, and the inexplicable rejections, will hurt your soul. A friend of mine sent me the following links: https://danluu.com/hiring-lemons/ https://danluu.com/hiring-lemons/ https://danluu.com/programmer-moneyball/ https://danluu.com/programmer-moneyball/ https://danluu.com/algorithms-interviews/ https://danluu.com/algorithms-interviews/ Good luck!