Give Better Design Feedback With Loom
Give context to your code. Review, document, and collaborate with asynchronous video.
What is a code review?
Many of our customers use Loom to run async code reviews to show off exactly what they built, add visual and verbal context, and provide documentation for future reference.
Here’s why engineering teams love using Loom:
- Give visual context to code reviews
- Collaborate asynchronously. Skip that meeting and record a loom instead.
- Centralize team knowledge
You can even embed Looms directly into tools you use every day, like GitHub, GitLab, JIRA, and Netlify.
How Loom's Engineering Team Does Code Reviews
As part of our fully remote engineering team we lean heavy on async communication to keep our sprint’s moving across many different timezones.
Our engineering guidelines require each pull request to have the following content:
- A demo loom to showcase the expected outcome and behavior of the code
- A code overview loom to walk through how and why the code was written
- A PR description with text comments to provide any additional context or information
- Clear and descriptive commit messages
Longer pull requests, which we try and avoid, will typically have longer explanations and messages compared to smaller PRs.
Each PR has a maximum of two reviewers to avoid any confusion or fragmented expectations around who needs to sign off on the pull request.
It’s become common practice for loommates to include a gif when they approve each PR to add a little joy and delight to someone’s day.
Why code reviews matter
Code reviews exist to improve the software development lifecycle by adding a step for peer review and feedback.
Code reviews serve you and your broader engineering team so everyone can write better software.
At Loom, code reviews are deeply ingrained into our engineering methodology. They help ensure we keep the quality bar high and ship features that delight our users around the world.
Code reviews help new loommates learn the code base and by doing code reviews with Loom it builds a living repository of information that be easily referenced later on.
When doing code reviews your goal should be to make the process as frictionless and seamless as possible.
