Happy Thanksgiving, for the Americans out there, and happy November to the rest of our fans!
Our Engineers and Product team have been hard at work iterating on the Sema experience for our users.
We’re excited to announce several improvements to the feature formerly known as “Suggested Comments”. We have a new name and a new level of awesome.
Introducing “Snippets”
Great code is often built based on the wisdom of other coders. Wouldn’t having the best practices at your fingertips be helpful? We thought the same thing.
Snippets help you leave better reviews by inserting pre-written content into your comments based on thinking and advice from the world’s best sources.
Whether it’s AirBnb Style Guides, Golang best practices, or Terraform tips and tricks, we’ve got ’em — and the list keeps growing.
Using Snippets in Your Code Review
Snippets are found in three places.
1. Admin Dashboard
You can administer them from the Snippets tab in the Sema dashboard. They are grouped by Snippet Collections. You will notice that we have a few collections turned on by default. Browse and activate other snippets you’d like to use and you’re ready to go!
2. Snippet search
As you review code on GitHub, you will notice the Snippet Search at the top of the comment form. Here you can search for the snippets in the collections you have turned on. Once you’ve found the perfect snippet, you can click to copy+paste or insert it directly into your comment.
3. In-line snippet suggestions
Also, as you type, we’ll highlight words or phrases in your comment that might have associated meaningful snippets. Simply click on the word and see the related snippets. From there you can click to copy and insert as normal.
Create your own Snippets!
You can also create your own Snippets for personal use. On the Snippet tab in the Dashboard, just click “Add a Snippet” on the “My Snippets” collection. These Snippets will appear in the Snippet Search like all the others.
What’s next?
They say ‘teamwork makes the dream work.
Based on your feedback, we are developing a Teams feature where Snippets can be created and shared across your team.
We’ll also be adding new Collections of Snippets based on your suggestions — if there are others you’d like to see, drop me a note by replying to this email.
As always, grateful for your feedback.
Matt
Your Friendly Neighborhood CEO-Type Person
