I’ve recently started trying to identify bottlenecks in my workflow and take a little bit of time to see if I can make things a little easier with automation. It’s always a tradeoff between the time spent automating something and actually getting work done. In this case, I can say the balance tipped way over to the side of saving me a great amount of time.
I frequently have to do code reviews. I try to dedicate a specific time of day to work on code reviews so I can focus on them and knock them out prior to other work. In a lot of cases, people are waiting on those pull requests so they can move forward with their work. I use Kaleidoscope to perform diffs and to resolve merge conflicts. I discovered after a while, I was doing a dance between several applications to get my code review done.
I would do the following:
- Copy the branch name from the Pull Request in the Stash web interface
- Paste that into terminal following a git checkout command
- Use the
ksdiff
command to open Kaleidoscope and perform a diff between the current branch (which was the proposed changes int he pull request) asnd thedevelop
branch.
This set of steps doesn’t seem like a lot until you have to do it several times a day. 😁
I try to maintain a good ratio between doing the actual work, and working on tools that enable me to do my work more efficiently. I spent a pretty hefty amount of time on the tool I’m about to discuss, but I think it has already paid dividends in terms of time saved. I created an opinionated Alfred workflow that helps me get to reviewing code quickly. Before walking through it, here are the following assumptions the tool is making:
- You own Alfred
- You purchased the Alfred PowerPack to enable workflow functionality
- You own a copy of Kaleidoscope
- You have installed the
ksdiff
command line tool that enables you to open Kaleidoscope directly to a diff
There is really only 1 setup step that will be specific to your environment. You will need to open the workflow and edit the initial List Filter to include a list of repo locations that you want to be able to use for code review.
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After that, you should be able to open Alfred and use the keyword codereview
to trigger your initial list of code review options.
The workflow will then perform the following:
- List the repository locations you created in the List Filter
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Based on the repository selection, will run a Ruby script to list all local branches and let you select a source branch
- This will be the “left” side of the diff
After the source branch selection, will present a list of branches again for the destination branch
- This will be the “right” side of the diff
After all of these selections have been made, will call the
ksdiff
command to open Kaleidoscope to the diff for review
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Here is an overvierw of the workflow:
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I pushed this workflow to a GitHub Repo as well. I hope it helps abyone who happens to use the same tools!