Using CodeTour to offer codebase suggestions as well

Just like in any consultancy, in Microsoft Services you tend to jump from project to project having to learn a new codebase all the time. Usually it is some combo of a Word/Markdown/OneNote doc and some (unit|integration) tests. Or maybe it’s just a build, sprinkle some debug, catch some errors, setup more settings/services and keep going until it’s running.

Some of you may or may not be aware of a pretty cool extension for VSCode called CodeTour. Here is a snippet from the README:

CodeTour is a Visual Studio Code extension, which allows you to record and playback guided walkthroughs of your codebases. It’s like a virtual brownbag, or table of contents, that can make it easier to onboard (or re-board!) to a new project/feature area, visualize bug reports, or understand the context of a code review/PR change.

It’s the last part in bold where I’ve gotten a chance to really get to use CodeTour in my day to day work. As a senior member in the organization I’m often joining new projects to ramp or brought in to review exisiting codebases. Usually in each of these scenarios one of the items for me to do is scroll through the code and offer suggestions on how things can be improved. This can range from code best practices (e.g. make sure your async methods end in Async for clarity) to best practices for consistency in the codebase (e.g. make sure you have an .editorconfig for the project) and so on.

So with that, I’m actually documenting my findings with a recorded code tour instead of a list in OneNote/Word/Excel. I hope this will actually make consuming what I find a lot easier for the developers on my current engagement. I’m also hoping that as we move our on-prem services to the cloud that CodeTour may help out in the design phase when we are working out what code will need to me updated.

I’ve just started to explore how to potentially use this but I have a feeling there maybe more ways I can start to incorporate this tool into my dev workflow.