Changelog - June

A Reviewable post written by Fahrzin Hemmati.By: Fahrzin Hemmati
Published: Friday, June 30, 2023

We're going to switch to monthly posts, mainly to reduce my workload! As a result, these changelogs will include a lot of changes you've already been able to see for a while, and a few changes from the last week.

We'll also be skipping the smaller tweaks and bug fixes, so these posts don't become enormous. Otherwise, these would be pages long (our eng team is incredibly productive!).

Code Review Experience

File action dropdown

file header with dropdown activated

Previously, there were icons in the file header, but we wanted to add more actions without cluttering up the header. Now, there's a dropdown so you can access all the capabilities easily.

You may notice in the screenshot another feature we added recently, which is the ability to start a file-level discussion. This is very useful when you want to discuss a file as a whole, rather than a specific line or lines.

BTW BTW is only used in the first comment

When responding to a discussion, if you started your comment with "BTW", previously we would change your disposition to "Discussing", from whatever it was before. However, we got feedback that this was unexpected since it's more of a disposition for that comment specifically, not the discussion about the code. Now, we only set your disposition based on "BTW" if the discussion starts with that.

Merge Queue support

We added support for GitHub's new (beta) Enterprise feature, Merge Queues. We will run the completion condition for the queue, and there's an extra property (review.pullRequest.mergeQueueCheck) set when the condition is being run as part of the merge queue. This allows running a different subset of your checks when in the queue.

Highlighting TOML files

Self-explanatory, but if you're writing/editing TOML files as part of a Python project, they're now properly syntax-highlighted!

Performance improvements!

We improved a ton of performance here again! If you open large reviews often, you'll notice we reduced CPU usage significantly, especially if you switch to the dashboard and back.

PR Dashboard

I personally love this feature of ours, so any improvements here I'll highlight when i can.

Bots can be filtered for as well

dashboard filtering

If a bot authors or reviews a PR, you can still filter for it in the dashboard. We received a lot of feedback about this, as we had initially decided against filtering for bots as we thought they were irrelevant, however it seems some companies use bots in more meaningful ways than we do, so users want to find PR's a certain bot is involved in.

Admin Experience

Handling auto-connecting repositories more often

Automatically-connecting repositories, if enabled, works even if GitHub fails to tell us specifically when the repository is created. Now if we get any events related to a new repository, we'll activate any behavior associated with new repositories.