[codeapprove]

There are a lot of great tools in the space right now, I firmly believe that teams should not just accept what GitHub gives them. After all, we don't use Notepad as our main editor just because it ships with the machine.

I started CodeApprove (https://codeapprove.com) because I saw from the inside how big tech companies (Google, Meta, etc) optimize PR review. Rather than try to automate, replace, or artificially speed up the process, instead they've made great interfaces that allow reviewers and authors to always know whose "turn" it is in a code review and quickly find what they need to address. The goal is to get to resolution (or in other words, consensus) in as few rounds as possible and to make code review painless to the rounds themselves are short. A good tool goes a long way here.

Last year I also wrote a quick survey of other tools which I've seen in the space and think are promising: https://medium.com/codeapprove/the-best-modern-code-review-t...

That list is already a bit out of date, I can think of some newcomers (Planar, Pullpo) which would also be on the list if I was writing it today.

I've helped a bunch of teams make their code review process better (tools aside) and if you're looking for free advice on how to help your team review better I'm always happy to talk to people about this. Email is in my bio.

[rupertdenton]

That's awesome! Can I ask what sort of feedback you were getting that lead to CodeApprove. I agree that sitting with the incumbents shouldn't be our default setting, curious about which parts you are trying to improve?

[codeapprove]

I was actually in charge of a large open-source effort at Google (75 repositories, dozens of internal devs, hundreds of contributors) so I had a very unique position of being able to watch Googlers attempt to use Google engineering practices on GitHub.

For the most part they loved the open-source work (a lot more flexibility than internal systems) but they all complained about the code review! It just didn't give them the same rapid drive to consensus they got with Google's internal tools. And I think they were right.

So after I left Google I was very inspired to work on a better code review system for developers on GitHub. And that's how CodeApprove was born!