This is a post for developers, project managers, and Synthnostate fans following my progress.

Tracking and organizing tasks, sprints, and feature wishlists is a pain. In corporate gigs I’ve used cloud services from Basecamp to Github, one with “cards”, Google docs/spreadsheets, and wikis - and I hate them all! So when I started Synthnostate as a solo project, I opted for the sweet simplicity of paper notes and text files.

Then it dawned on me that code comments are the best place for TODOs. This old-school method has the advantages of 1) goading you to review and inspect all your code, and 2) quickly jumping to the relevant code when when you search for TODO flags in your editor. Any task centered around a specific part of the code gets a TODO in that code. There are some exceptions like broad general changes, brand new ideas, and artwork. I think this could work for most small(ish) team projects where the programmer(s) aren’t micromanaged.

Synthnostate Progress

Here are the current counts of TODO flags in Synthnostate (with some overlap) for future reference. These numbers should start to go way down during the Beta phase.

• 301 - TODO (must/should do)
  • 224 after cleaning up miscategorized
• 64 - TBD, TK (text/content/layout to be decided)
• 79 - XXX, FIXME, TEMP, TENTATIVE (pretty broken, followup required)
• 79 - KLUDGE, DEPRECATED, ASSUMPTION (fertile ground for fixes & simplifications)
• 14 - CHK (error checking/handling needed, OR code review needed)
• 163 - CLEANUP, ORG (messy, good to cleanup, organize, refactor)
• 55 - OPT (optimization recommended)
• 74 - ENH (possible enhancement)

2022.11.28 update

Where do they all come from?! It’s okay, the new TODOs and CLEANUP/ORG are plans for v0.9 and 1.0; OPT/ENH can wait until post-release or forever.

• 251 TODO
• 67 TBD/TK
• 81 XXX/FIXME/etc
• 81 KLUDGE/etc
• 14 CHK
• 219 CLEANUP/ORG
• 62 OPT
• 102 ENH

Tools

Here’s my (bash) shell script function to search/categorize TODOs (open image in new tab to read it)