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Comment by lloydde | Hacker News Reader

In a couple of work environments, people would initial the TODO -- I'm trying to remember if Joyent is one of those companies. I liked this, because it was extra honesty about the craft and I could pick the person's brain if there were issues in that code. It would also seem to allow to get a TODO brain dump when someone is planning on leaving the company or assist in who to bring to the table for refactoring of a large component.

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Tagging TODOs is really useful. I can always look at source control, but that's more effort than seeing a name or bug number. At Google our linters are actually configured to create errors for any TODO/FIXME that isn't immediately followed by a user id or bug number: e.g. TODO(12345) or TODO(myname). I thought it was a little annoying at first, but over time I've realized how much faster it is to have that additional context.

I think it's important to highlight that it's definitely about context rather than ownership when adding a name or bug number to a TODO comment.

"// TODO(dmi): update after moving to Java8" doesn't necessarily mean that it's _me_ that has to fix it, but that someone can come to me and say "Tell me more about this". This took me a while to learn/remember, but it's very helpful. The hardest part for me to keep in mind was that someone else's name on a TODO shouldn't mean I ignore it.

I've found that a time stamp is super useful in TODOs, etc.

Timestamps and Users that added TODOs should be available from the praise/annotate/blame tools of your source control system.

Exactly. If people argue this is hard to look up, they need to get better at using their tools.

For example, IntelliJ, just "shift+shift+a.n.n+enter", bam! VSCode has a nice plugin that will do it, same with sublime.

Particular shout out to the really great VSCode GitLens plugin that adds gray CodeLens "ghost annotate" to every editor window.

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