To communicate isn’t just getting rid of syntax errors and making code work. The code should communicate ideas to people through a programming language that computers can also understand.

You should adopt semantic variables, classes, modules, and methods names. For instance, in Ruby, we avoid using particular prefixes such as is_paid, get_name and set_name. In their places, we use directly paid?, name, and name=.

My advice is to use idiomatic and features that the programming language you use offers to you whenever possible, and figure out ways to better pass the message.

Why wouldn’t we be worried about semantics, typos, and styles? We should care for the quality of our code, and the many concepts that define it. You can start by using a linter to collect some issues from your codebase automatically.

Do you review your Pull/Merge Request before assigning Reviewers?

If you work in a team opening a Pull Request (or Merge Request) looks appropriate. However, have you ever thought about opening a Pull/Merge Request when working by yourself? Here's a checklist of things you can review in your own:

• Pick the correct target branch
• Make Drafts explicit
• Name things properly
• Ask help for tools
• Remove the noise
• Fetch necessary data
• Understand Mergeability
• Pass the message
• Add screenshots
• Be found in the future
• Comment inline in your changes

Read the blog post for more detailed explanation for each item :D

What else do you review before asking for code review?

Using an inclusive language is crucial for fostering a diverse culture. Git has changed the naming conventions to be more language-inclusive, and so you should change. Our development tools, like GitHub and GitLab, already supports the change.

SourceLevel deals very nicely with repositories that changed the master branch to a more appropriate word. Besides, you can use the grep linter the look for exclusive terms contained in the source code.

As the inclusive language gap may happen in other aspects of our lives, have you already thought about them?

One of the magic tricks git performs is the ability to rewrite log history. You can do it in many ways, but git rebase -i is the one I most use. With this command, It’s possible to switch commits order, remove a commit, squash two or more commits, or edit, for instance.

It’s particularly useful to run it before opening a pull request. It allows developers to “clean up” the mess and organize commits before submitting to review. If you follow the practice 3 and 4, then the list of commits should look very similar to a task list. It should reveal the rationale you had, telling the story of how you end up with that final code.

Out of most of the VCS solutions out there, we found Gitlab was the most feature complete with a free community edition. Their DevSecops offering is also a very robust solution. Gitlab CI/CD was quite easy to setup and the direct integration with your VCS + CI/CD is also a bonus. Out of the box integration with major cloud providers, alerting through instant messages etc. are all extremely convenient. We push our CI/CD updates to MS Teams.

Gitlab as A LOT of features that GitHub and Azure DevOps are missing. Even if both GH and Azure are backed by Microsoft, GitLab being open source has a faster upgrade rate and the hosted by gitlab.com solution seems more appealing than anything else! Quick win: the UI is way better and the Pipeline is way easier to setup on GitLab!

(1/2) In terms of DevOps we chose GitHub, Git, Visual Studio Code, Sentry, Yarn, CircleCI.

• GitHub was chosen because of its features such as GitHub Projects, GitHub Issues, and GitHub Milestones, which are normally separate tools such as Trello for issue tracking, but come as part a package with GitHub. This choice is also influenced by our decision for using Git for version control.

• Git was chosen as our version control because of the wide popularity, familiarity in our team, and rich list of tools that support integrations. A tool such as Perforce does not suit our needs because we do not require the mapping features important to huge code bases and the lack of many popular integrations is not appealing.

• Visual Studio Code was chosen as our primary source-code editor for an array of reasons. VS code works well with our chosen version control system since it comes with embedded Git control out of the box. For every language or framework that we are working in, there are multiple extensions to improve our team's productivity and efficiency. It also has live collaboration through their LiveShare feature and more, all while maintaining itself as a lightweight tool.

• Sentry, Yarn, andCircleCI in part 2.

We will use the ubiquitous combination of Git for version control and GitHub for code hosting. They have all the functionality we require for this project and will fit perfectly into our development workflow with up to three developers working simultaneously on the codebase. We also plan on using GitHub Actions to set up our CI/CD workflows.

VS Code will be our primary code editor due to its combination of developer-friendly features, including a large extensions library, IntelliSense code completion, Git integration, and powerful debugging tools. Furthermore, it offers better performance and more simplicity than full-fledged IDEs while supporting a multitude of languages.

Selenium will be used to perform automated testing of our web application. It supports all major web browsers and operating systems and supports test scripts to be written in multiple languages, including Python which we are also planning to use for our back-end, helping us to consolidate the languages required for our project. In addition, Selenium is free and has support for most CI/CD tools.

At DeployPlace we use self-hosted GitLab, we have chosen GitLab as most of us are familiar with it. We are happy with all features GitLab provides, I can’t imagine our life without integrated GitLab CI. Another important feature for us is integrated code review tool, we use it every day, we use merge requests, code reviews, branching. To be honest, most of us have GitHub accounts as well, we like to contribute in open source, and we want to be a part of the tech community, but lack of solutions from GitHub in the area of CI doesn’t let us chose it for our projects.