5 ways using TODO comments will make you a better programmer

1. Leave signs and find your way when you get lost

Programming is a craft that requires focus. But at times you’re keeping track of too many things in your head and you lose it. By adding TODO comments, you can keep notes in your code that lead you back to focus. Using a tool like imdone or the TODO parser in your IDE or code editor it’s easy to find a TODO and jump to it in the code.

2. Show progress to keep you productive and motivated

One of our customers, Nick Winner said this…

I’ll usually open imdone in a new window and throw it up on another monitor. I can just watch the tasks blip off as I complete them which not only adds to my productivity, but also just improves my mood.

3. Perform code reviews and mentor with ease

By leaving bookmarks with tokens like INFO or NOTE and using imdone’s board, you can organize the comment cards in a way that makes sense for jumping straight to code while performing code reviews and mentoring. To make your life even easier try using tags, metadata and filtering for different flows, features or components.

4. Keep your team up to date without leaving the code

If you’re using a version control system like git, you can share your board simply by checking in your project.

5. Expose technical debt by creating your own tech debt workflow

Some projects have tons of TODO comments. Imdone lets you jump to the TODO comment source of a card. Take a look at the comment and see if it still makes sense. If not, flag it with a +remove tag. Later, you can filter by that tag in imdone and delete all the +remove comments with a click.