How Video Messages Help Us Explain and Review Code

by Jérémy Rouet

At Weet, we have witnessed significant improvement in asynchronous communication using Weet, our video messaging tool. Our team’s performance, as well as that of the product team, has greatly improved. Our new video messaging tool has provided a more impactful way for our engineering teams with less ambiguity, and communication with more context. These impactful code reviews would have been impossible without a combination of both narrative and visual context. Let me share the new features;

With the new Weet 2.0 release it is easy to track your sections and time them for your preference. Our AI has determined 2:30 is the ideal section length but additional options are available.

Now you can preview your screen recording before finalizing a weet to share with your team. With the timeline section player you also get a play by play.

Also, unlike other online screen recording tools, Weet allows you to co-collaborate with your teammates by using webcam, audio or rich text reactions.  

In the event of a new project, or changes implemented in the workspace, employees may ask for further clarification on the issues at hand to further their understanding. This is also an opportunity to brainstorm, increase workplace productivity, and disseminate further information on the project at hand.

We now use Weet videos to prepare for and conduct code reviews. For example, we record a code review in a Weet and put the link directly in Gitlab and GitHub.

According to Baseline, the motivation behind code reviews is to improve code quality. Every change, bug fix etc. must have a specific reason and offer a solution. Weet enables the flow of the code review process by allowing screen share and explanation with audio and/or webcam for an effective collaborative process.

At times we want to build a feature that our user can see and interact with comfortably; therefore, we open a code review. It may turn out difficult, explaining how the code we’re reviewing relates to matters such as interactions and interface. To illustrate this, we use Weet to clarify before the code is reviewed.

We always find it useful to have a story on the process, especially when fixing a bug or issue. We focus more on the underlying development, investigation, and improving process, which may be complicated.  Using a weet, we can spread communal knowledge as well as learn more information on a fix. This makes reviewing the code more productive.

We have faced a common issue in setting up a new code repository and getting it up and running. Text instructions have been used as the most common set up steps. However, using the weet video helps us provide more detailed instructions on setup commands and how to fix common installation errors.

We have been using architecture diagrams in our documents to explain information flow on our systems. However, we found out that using weet is much faster to redirect someone onboard our new system.

Weet has saved us the hassle of memorizing how an architecture system works and reading our wiki diagrams. Using weets, engineers can easily read the diagram and review the story on how we landed on the enactment. They will then engage us in questions from a deeper level of understanding. This helps save time, which would have been spent explaining written copies.

Weet helps eliminate explaining repeatable steps that make it long to debug a problem.  Text instructions with steps may tend to get more complicated when the debug flow gets complex. The steps become even hard to follow through over a text. By use of a weet video, our engineers find it easy to help debug the problem.

Some of the pages are just too complicated to navigate. This is a  problem we come across too often. Our weets introduce users to detailed documentation that enables them to navigate to the information they are interested in at ease.

It’s so hard transferring what we see to text. We also identified a loss of clarity when trying to write up what we see. Text has been considered great, but at times it may not be precise enough. At times we want more information that explains a bug report on what is happening to fix it.

There is a loss of important information when transferring content from what you experience to text. It’s also hard as our support team may be using different terms to explain a bug issue. We have found great support in weet videos, which helps our technical and non technical teams fix bugs much faster. Weet saves on time.