Every engineer knows this situation well: You’re coding up a solution to some problem, and you discover there’s a different way to do it — an alternative that you just can’t complete right now.
Typically, your solution is “good enough” today. The alternative seems better on its merits, but it would take far more time and disruption today. Or maybe it has a cost that isn’t justified by our understanding of the problem today.
In any case, now you have a depressing problem: You’re preparing to submit something that you can already see is not the cleanest, best, most impressive choice.
The alleviation of a TODO
Of course, we as engineers have perfected a solution to this: The TODO! In a single line of code, we acknowledge that an alternative exists and alleviate the fear of ridicule for turning in our imperfect work.
// TODO(mikey): Inefficient traversal. Revise this when we have over 100 customers.
The management TODO
You can do this without…
- Agreeing with each one
- Letting management write unlimited todos