Stash 1.3 has arrived and is now more social with two new capabilities–pull requests and inline commenting. It lets developers share, work together as team, and make the entire process faster as well as seamless. Let’s drill some deeper into the new features of Stash 1.3.

Pull Requests

Pull request is an easy way for developers to contribute code, review changes, discuss them, and have the option of merging them into the existing code base. An excellent tool to communicate within a team, pull request allow developers to review and discuss changes with one another, make modifications and take it all back to the core point or branch.

A pull request starts with a branch and ends with a merge, where the code changes can be made in isolation and reviewed before being integrated with the mainline branch. You select the branch your changes are on, along with the branch you want to merge them to. Select multiple reviewers to review and approve changes, and finally you’ll have what you needs to be reviewed and merged.

Inline Commenting

This feature keeps the developer team engaged as a whole in a project, without any geographical restrictions. It lets your comments in context while collaborating, and have discussions inside your code. After adding a comment, reviewers are notified via email and a threaded discussion can take place in Stash. An audit of all discussions and updates is also maintained in the Stash, which went on around a feature or bug fix. In short, it lets the workflow smooth by fueling discussions and improving code quality.

Earlier in September, we saw the Beta version of Stash 1.3 with the same “Pull Requests” feature that adds a social element to the Git repository management software. Using it, developers working on the project can comment directly on the code, which promotes a social media-like interaction where they can discuss the work and help each other find ways to improve it. The Stash 1.2 was released a month before it, which came with features like painless migration, rapid file searching, noise signal filtering, and improved protection from data loss. Besides, it provided support for all major databases, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle, to enable administrators and developers to deploy to the custom environments of their chosen database.

With this development, it is quite evident that the developer social networks are growing up pretty much. And GitHub’s success is a wonderful example. GitHub’s success has been mainly in their awesome product market fit. The founders and employees really understood the market need and delivered a solid product to meet that need – A Social Network for developers.