The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

Stacked diffs for fast-moving code review (Interview)

9 snips

May 27, 2022

Guest

Greg Foster

Guest

Tomas Reimers

Tomas Reimers and Greg Foster, co-founders of Graphite, dive into the future of code review efficiencies. They discuss the evolution of Graphite from concept to reality, emphasizing the shift towards smaller, stacked pull requests for faster shipping. The duo shares insights on user feedback shaping their tool's development and the importance of community engagement. With $20M in funding from a16z, they explore how Graphite enhances collaboration and optimizes workflows, positioning it as a game-changer in modern software development.

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INSIGHT

Internal Tools to Products

Internal tools often evolve into successful products, like Slack and Flickr.
Iterating before user acquisition allows for organic product development.

ANECDOTE

Initial Code Review Debates

Early Graphite development was driven by internal debates about code review workflows.
Greg Foster, coming from Airbnb, preferred GitHub's standard pull requests, while Tomas Reimers advocated for Facebook's stacked diffs.

ANECDOTE

Pivot to Graphite

Initial interest in Graphite came from colleagues and friends who saw it in use.
The shutdown of Fabricator created a demand, leading to a beta program and eventually a public waitlist with high demand.

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This week we’re peeking into the future again — this time we’re looking at the future of modern code review and workflows around pull requests. Jerod and Adam were joined by two of the co-founders of Graphite — Tomas Reimers and Greg Foster.

Graphite is an open-source CLI and code review dashboard built for engineers who want to write and review smaller pull requests, stay unblocked, and ship faster. We cover all the details – how they got started, how this product emerged from another idea they were working on, the state of adoption, why stacking changes is the way of the future, how it’s just Git under the hood, and what they’re doing with the $20M in funding they just got from a16z.

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Featuring:

Tomas Reimers – GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Greg Foster – GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!