MergeTimer

Hello from Barcelona! Marco here, co-founder of Pullpo.io, creators of MergeTimer. For the past year, my co-founder Cesc and I have been intensely focused on one specific thing: code reviews. We analyzed and interviewed dozens of teams of different sizes, industries, and countries to truly understand the best practices surrounding code reviews. One thing we know for sure is that code reviews need to be fast. This is very important for two main reasons: 1. It's much more efficient. Having fast code reviews and short-lived feature branches is much more efficient. You have fewer merge conflicts, and it’s easier and faster to get into the context of recent pull requests than stale ones. 2. Code reviews are a blocking step by default. Unless you use pair programming (not for everyone, for every task) or SHIP/SHOW/ASK (which I recommend), most code reviews are blocking. That means until the changes meet all the requirements and get the necessary approvals, the code won’t go into production. The problem is that many developers still don’t prioritize code reviews over other tasks, and they aren’t incentivized to do so. I’m not blaming developers here; as developers, we all hate waiting a long time for our PRs to be reviewed. Some companies solve this with pair programming and trunk-based development. This way, they make their workflow enforce fast code reviews (they are already reviewing while coding). However, they also force pair programming, which I believe isn’t ideal for every task or every developer all the time. So, the question is: How can we make the workflow enforce fast code reviews without forcing pair programming all the time? We came up with MergeTimer. Of course, you can always deactivate automatic merge, pause the timer, or add branch protection rules to the main branch. But just having a timer on PRs gives developers a clear and common objective of completing the code review before the timer reaches zero. I’ll be paying attention to all comments and questions! Let me know what you think!

Super cool idea Marco! With this tool, I want to apply to a job again, just for feeling like Ethan Hunt on Mission: Impossible merging PRs 😜 I wish you the best!

Wow this product makes a lot of sense, great work!

cool tool, kind of gamification of pr reviews 😅