Git credit, not blame: upvote lines of code: a Visual Studio Code plugin proposal

Imagine the immense sense of satisfaction an engineer will receive if her one line of code has 10,000 likes. Imagine the culture shift if that one line of code is really just a comment.

Problem Statement

Enterprise projects suffer from documentation rot and wishful patching with empty TODO promises scattered throughout the codebase. Moreover, it can be difficult for managers to identify and reward engineers for writing maintainable code as engineers may be incentivized to write code for themselves today and not the others who follow tomorrow. Finally, it can be difficult for managers to identify portions of a legacy codebase which will have a high return on being rewritten or require an update to documentation.

Current State

Today, the only tool to maintain and receive feedback on coding standards is through the pull request. During the pull request, engineers rely heavily upon tribal knowledge to maintain readability and peer review the request to identify gaps such as the addition of documentation or comments. Over time, as team members leave and tribal knowledge is lost, documentation rot will occur and standards will suffer. Soon, there is legacy code that was not peer reviewed by the current team. Moreover, teams who rely upon the TODO practice will begin to experience the building of insurmountable, poorly prioritized technical debt.

Proposal

Upvote (or emojify) sections of code with plugins into IDEs like Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code and leverage git blame to assign credit for work. Finally, rebrand git blame to git credit.

Benefits

Engineers will feel invested in the process as they reward outstanding contributions and identify logic gaps and unreadable code portions. As a new data point, engineers can perform better root cause analysis and managers can better prioritize the value of maintenance issues versus new features. Leveraging this feature, retention and monetary programs could be developed to identify and reward engineers for building extensible, maintainable, and well-commented code. Imagine the immense sense of satisfaction an engineer will receive if her one line of code has 10,000 likes. Imagine the culture shift if that one line of code is really just a comment.