Five Sema Use Cases

Table of contents

Dear Sema Community,

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As many of you already know, using Sema’s plug-in allows users to turn code reviews into meaningful mentorship moments. Dev teams, students, open source maintainers, new hires, and many others benefit from our free Chrome extension.

‍Sema is built by engineers, for engineers — and here to support the craft of engineering at every stage of the journey. Let’s take a peak at five of the most common use cases.

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Teaching

Educators rarely catch a break, but Sema is trying to change that where we can — starting with cost: zero, zilch, none, free for educators always. Just download the Chrome extension, open GitHub, and you’re good to go.

Reduce your admin time and maximize your student time by using our Summaries, Tags, and Snippets to grade quickly and consistently, no matter the class size. Bring your class together virtually in Sema to make group learning, assignments and projects a breeze.

Your students can use Sema to learn from and collaborate with each other simpler than ever before. Once they’ve graduated your course, Sema will help them build a portfolio of their top work so they can land their dream job or placement.

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Ramping

Less company wiki searching, more 1:1 guidance. Upload and insert relevant Snippets from your company’s style guide and standards — or create them automatically as you leave comments.

Address the pain-points that come from remote onboarding. Karthik, a senior developer responsible for ramping new hires, thinks “[Sema] is phenomenal and super powerful to ramp up new teams who are remote, with fewer Zoom calls.

Ebru, a newly-onboarded developer at an up-and-coming tech startup, had this to say about Sema: “We all come from different cultures and backgrounds. This helps get the tone right so there’s not an immediate ‘oh no’ when someone reads constructive feedback.”

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Building

From bringing your company’s knowledge to all of your engineers, to making the annual review process easier than ever, Sema’s code review tool helps big engineering organizations connect the dots.

“It lowers the friction giving feedback. Snippets and tags are a nicer way to just provide some quick feedback” says Adam, a junior developer moving up in a large software company.

Karen, another developer growing in her career, uses the data Sema collects to help her promotion pitch. “It saves me a lot of time at performance review time — telling the story I want to tell.”

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Open Source

Distributed teams need great feedback. Banish misunderstanding across your repositories by using Summaries and Tags to give feedback that’s instantly understandable, even asynchronously. Upload and insert relevant Snippets from the project’s documentation, or watch in awe as your contributors build that guide automatically whenever they leave a comment.

Brandon, just getting his bearings in open source projects, says “first time contributors like me can understand what is being looked for and how they should code. That way I won’t get slammed on my review.”

From a maintainer’s perspective, Deepak thinks “the knowledge based on our open source projects is so hard to maintain. [Sema] helps a lot.”

Open Source Maintainers use Sema to share coding guidelines and best practices. Contributors show off their work with the Developer Portfolio.

Contractors

Use your client’s “how we build things here” to put their best practice at your fingertips. Or wow them by creating a best practice guide that their whole team can use.

Michael, a senior developer at a San Francisco startup, said “We don’t have the same amount of time to ramp up our contractors — it’s great to be able to onboard them faster.”

Fady, a top-rated freelance software developer, lamented: “I wish I had this five years ago so I could prove I was right for more freelance projects.”

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What’s Next?

Now that you’ve seen a few of Sema’s most popular use cases, which one resonates with you the most? Send us an email to let us know.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could see stats from your repos from long before you started using Seam’s code review tool? We thought so too, and that’s what our mad scientists have started cooking up.

On the horizon: Repo Sync — a streamlined way to import historical data from all your repos, from day one of using Sema or day 100. You’ll love building Developer Portfolios that highlight achievements throughout your career.

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