A few years ago we were talking with John Nunemaker at RubyConf and he made a comment that we’ve all thought about before: you shouldn’t use code you couldn’t write yourself. The corollary is that if you haven’t at least _read_ the code, how could you possibly know if you could have written it yourself. The conversation reminded me of an idea I’d thought about for quite a while: even if you believed in such a high-minded ideal as reading all the code, it’s completely impractical to do without some kind of tool.

Codifferous was designed to allow code review of the actual current code base. While you can review pull requests with Codifferous, you don’t need them. There’s never any need to gather up some specific code to request a review. Codifferous keeps track of every line of code you've already reviewed in the branch you’re viewing and makes it easy to keep conversations rolling on any line(s) of code in the codebase. Over time, you and your team would have fully reviewed everything but the most recent changes, making it easy to stay up to date not just on your own code but on all the libraries you use.

Linus’s Law states that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”. We wanted to deliver on that idea in a measurable, transparent way by making it possible for entire communities to review libraries and let new developers make decisions based on more than blog posts and download counts.

Codifferous is currently on pause. We had good luck with signups, but our current products got more paying customers faster. Think we should un-pause it? Drop us a line and let us know.