Customer Stories

Customer Story: Upsource in Feedonomics

Hi everyone!

Today we are happy to share with you how Upsource is used by Feedonomics, a company that combines best-in-class technology and service to list products everywhere people shop online, including Google Shopping, Amazon, and Facebook. Feedonomics services many of the world’s most prolific advertising agencies and brands, including over 30% of the top 1,000 internet retailers.

We were happy to have a Q&A session with Brian Roizen, a Chief Architect and a Cofounder of Feedonomics.

Could you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Hi! My name is Brian Roizen and I am the Chief Architect and Cofounder of Feedonomics. In addition to overseeing all of Feedonomics’ Automation Processes, I also love taking the most annoying manual tasks and automating them. I am excited to discuss how Upsource has helped us up to our game when it comes to code reviews across our engineering team.

What does your company do?

Feedonomics is a technology platform that allows eCommerce stores to easily optimize their product data and list products on hundreds of different advertising channels like Amazon, Google Shopping, and Facebook.

When did you start using Upsource?

We started experimenting with Upsource in May 2019, with a full adoption across our entire engineering team in July of 2019.

Which features do you find useful for your company’s processes?

We love the inline commenting feature, isolated commit reviews, and branch tracking features. These are of course standard features, but they are really implemented extremely well and are easy and simple to use. CodeIntelligence is fantastic as well because it’s great for enforcing proper coding styles and static analysis of our PHP code. Before that, it was a very manual process and, as such, we would miss small issues.

What’s your approach to the code review process?

Code reviews require at least one owner of the software to review and approve the change. We try to keep changes small, when possible, but that is often easier said than done. For large changes, a big part is making sure nothing will break current behavior, while new features can later be validated further on production and tweaked if necessary.

How do you measure the effectiveness of code reviews?

How long the review takes to complete is important to measure for efficiency. As for effectiveness, ultimately it is tied to the effectiveness of the product. How many releases are made that need to be patched or reverted later?

Since you introduced a code review in your company, do you think the quality of code has changed?

Absolutely, the quality has improved even while we’ve doubled the size of our engineering team in the last year.

What did you use before, and why did you choose Upsource?

Before, we were using git diffs directly in our terminal. Visibility wasn’t quite as nice, of course, but the real issue was not being able to use inline comments – you get so much more context when you are viewing a comment right inline with the code – plus we like the ability to track their resolution.

Do you use any other JetBrains products?

PHPStorm, and we love it!

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We’d like to thank Brian and Feedonomics for taking part in this Q&A.

If you want to share your experience with us, please let us know by posting a comment or by contacting us.