GitHub has a really great feature in commit comments that is perfect for a small, loose team like ours to do code reviews. We can look at a given commit and provide comments on a line or the commit as a whole. The committer gets notified, and conversation continues.

Let me explain a bit more about our review process. We’re a small team without much hierarchy, so we don’t have specific rules or guidelines about how a review should function. Basically, when we’re ready for someone else on the team to look at our code, we send them a message with a reference (like a GitHub link) to the relevant code. It’s more like “hey look what I did!”

To make that process a bit more streamlined, we’ve built a little tool called reviewth.is. It acts as an endpoint for a Post-Receive Hook from GitHub that parses every commit message. If it sees a #reviewthis hashtag, it’ll take every GitHub username (signified by @username) or email address and send a nice email with all of the important information.

So, our process has gone from:

• finish really great bit of code
• commit and push
• grab the commit URL from GitHub
• write an email to the right team member(s) asking to take a look
• code gets reviewed, commented on, and maybe updated

To:

• finish a really great bit of code
• commit and push (with a slightly revised message)
• code gets reviewed, commented on, and maybe updated

Minus 2 steps! Awesome! Feel free to use our hosted version at http://reviewth.is/. We’ve also open sourced the code, so you can fork it and roll your own.