How it started?
Over the past couple of years, honk has gone through several iterations. It has grown from a CLI that developers used locally, into a service that developers should not have to interact with directly. The current iteration is the outcome of pure laziness on my part while working for GoCardless, at having to notify my fellow team members of any pull requests I have opened, and vice-versa, them notifying me of any reviews on my pull requests.
Operating principle
honk is an app built by backend engineers for other engineers. The UI is not the flashiest to symbolise the fact that, ultimately, you should never have to interact with the UI. The Goose is prevalent in your day-to-day work, heard, but not seen! It is currently operating in alpha mode, and as such, is invite only, but please reach out if you would like to trial it out.
Pricing
For a temporary time while honk is running in alpha mode, it will be offered as a free model. This is subject to change with due notice, and will require a re-authorization of the app.
Features
Honk can notify you of the following things:
- pull requests, reviews and comments
- discussions and discussion comments
- CI checks - coming soon!
Pull Requests
Here, we can see a message about a pull request, referencing the author, the repository and pull request number as well as the title. For a quick glance, the following reactions are leveraged to highlight the latest status of a pull request:
- approved ✅
- rejected ❌
- commented on 💬
- merged 📦
- draft 🚧
At a glance, this will show the most recent state of the pull request. Updates, e.g. comments, reviews, approvals, would also be posted on the thread, for interested parties to follow along.
Why Honk?
There are a multitude of tools that serve similar purposes. However, I have always found myself needing:
- a different integration to be set up for a new service.
- an expressive way for users to configure what information they are interested in, so they don’t miss anything, but also don’t get spammed by information they’re not interested.
- Most such tools are typically restricted to a single service, Honk aims to offer an integration gateway between more services, so if you have one you need, please get in touch.