Today we restart our “Tools we use” series in which we look at tools and services that we use to build the OpenCage Geocoder. Today’s post features code-quality assessment tool Kritika.
Kritika runs an online service to allow us to regularly scan our source code for quality issues, helping us make sure we’re following best practices to create and maintain high quality code. The service integrates directly with Github, where our code repositories are held, so whenever we commit a change, Kritika scans it and lets us know if the developer failed to follow any best practices.
We recently added Kritika badges to our various open-source repositories, as a small signal to potential contributors that they’ll be diving into clean code. Here’s an example:
Please note the shiny “A” on that repository!
Although originally coming from a Perl background, Kritika now supports many different programming languages, which is great for us as we have wrapper libraries for the OpenCage API in many different languages. It is a great service that helps us, as a small business, move fast by making sure we’re keeping our code as simple and maintainable as possible.
As always in our product reviews I close by offering a few areas for improvement. In the case of Kritika there’s really only one area we see for improvement: while the usability of the web interface works, but it isn’t always as smooth and intuitive as one would hope. Sometimes I find myself wondering where I am, or how to get back to the information I need. Hopefully that can be fine-tuned in the future.
Overall though Kritika is a great service and we are happy to recommend it. Many thanks to the Kritika team for the great tool. If maintainable code is your thing, you should check it out.