8 ms·

Show HN: Toodles – Project management directly from the TODO's in your code

151 points by aviaviavi 8y ago

tln 8y ago
Looks interesting! I'm looking forward to trying it. The annotation syntax looks powerful but do people really edit thier code to adjust priorities and assignees? On a related note, I review `TODO` in PRs and consider whether to allow them in the codebase; and `DEBUG` to indicate code that shouldn't even be checked in. Does anyone else have a codetag for this? DEBUG doesn't seem to be a well-known codetag, and I'd prefer to use something other people use.
- aviaviavi 8y ago
  > Does anyone else have a codetag for this? DEBUG doesn't seem to be a well-known codetag, and I'd prefer to use something other people use. My team now uses `TODO(#pr)`. The #pr tag meaning it should be taken care of in this pull request, but I don't think that's common. Though maybe if toodles gets some use it will become more common :)
  - 0xffff2 8y ago
    Do you open PR's before you start writing code? How do you know what number to fill in?
    - aviaviavi 8y ago
      Ah sorry that was a little confusing. "#" signifies a tag / label in toodles, so #pr means adding the literal "pr" tag to the todo. So we're not adding a PR number.
- camtarn 8y ago
  We used FIXME to denote temporary changes that shouldn't be checked in, or sections which hadn't been written yet, and had a Git hook which stopped code being committed with that tag. (It also looked for 'console.log' and 'debugger' statements in our JS and blocked those, too.)
  - tln 8y ago
    FIXME is definitely a recognizable codetag, I'm glad to hear other people have found a similar use.
- adrianmsmith 8y ago
  FWIW I have seen tag NOCOMMIT used to indicate that a commit should be rejected by a pre-commit hook. Useful when you're putting in debug logging statements you want to remove later, or hard-coding your own credentials during development with the intent on making them configurable later, etc.
  - tln 8y ago
    Exactly! Thank you
ckluis 8y ago
It would be handy if github, gitlab, vs baked this kind of solution directly into their tooling to help expose todos in open source software
- aviaviavi 8y ago
  Oh that's a cool idea - Maybe there's an opportunity extend this into a github/gitlab/etc plugin. I'll look into that!
  - ckluis 8y ago
    Actually, if you did that you could create your own "open source todos" site that had links to todos in source code for popular projects
- dewey 8y ago
  https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13682#note_111441145 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13682#note_11...
- TranceMan 8y ago
  I remembered this popped up a while ago: https://github.com/naholyr/github-todos https://github.com/naholyr/github-todos Not used it myself
- mmgutz 8y ago
  [ticgit](https://github.com/schacon/ticgit https://github.com/schacon/ticgit) might be a better kind of solution
newhouseb 8y ago
We used something like this on the teams I lead at Dropbox to (what I felt) was great effect. We had a script that would regularly run and sync with Phabricator, our bug tracking tool of choice. One thing that we did differently, however, was to "assign" TODOs based on project or team rather than individual people. This way we could triage issues more flexibly to people according to their workloads and also build in more immunity to organizational change (when I was around we still had TODOs for the founders -- ten years in!).
- aviaviavi 8y ago
  Very cool! Assigning to teams definitely makes sense. I built this to help organization at a 4 person company so hopefully we'll grow enough to one day exercise that strategy :)
- ryandrake 8y ago
  > One thing that we did differently, however, was to "assign" TODOs based on project or team rather than individual people. If this works for your team, that’s awesome, but beware, I think you’d need a very disciplined team with good communication for this to work. I’ve found on some teams, if a task is not assigned to a single individual, nobody feels “on the hook” to do it. Things assigned to a group can tend to pile up un-looked-at, because everyone thinks someone else will take care of them. You can fix this by having some kind of rotating duty, where people pick up ownership of issues on some schedule but if you’re going that far might as well just assign directly from the start.
  - newhouseb 8y ago
    Right, we would triage these TODOs as part of a larger cadence once every week (or maybe every other?... it was a while ago). If a given TODO was both important and urgent, someone would be specifically assigned to address it.
  - tijs 8y ago
    * differentiate between backlog and ready for development: (bi)weekly triage * bugs first, then code reviews, then features * order features by priority; PM? Triage as well? * work ready for development list top to bottom Looks like the tags and keyvals could cover some of that. Maybe a bit hard to express priority (or change it). Would be neat if changes in the dashboard would update the todos in your code (bit scary though)
amelius 8y ago
Off topic, I'm looking for a solution to embed SVG diagrams directly in my code as comments, with the ability to edit them as in inkscape.
- alanbernstein 8y ago
  This sounds ambitious, but I imagine emacs can do it. Is that a feasible approach for you?
mockingbirdy 8y ago
Neat! We use a TODO.md, but this solution can keep track of the exact position. Looks very useful. If there's a way that the developers can run it without installing the Haskell suite (maybe binary releases for Windows, Linux, macOS), we will try it. Does it ignore paths like node_modules/ and others or support command line arguments for that?
- aviaviavi 8y ago
  > If there's a way that the developers can run it without installing the Haskell suite (maybe binary releases for Windows, Linux, macOS), we will try it. Great, I was waiting for someone to ask for a binary distribution before actually going ahead and setting it up. I'll go ahead and do that then. > Does it ignore paths like node_modules/ and others or support command line arguments for that? Yes, you set a list of regexes per project for toodles to ignore.
  - tln 8y ago
    Yes, I'm halfway through installing on my Mac, it'd be much easier to use a docker container or pre-built binary :) I created an issue suggesting a docker container, hope that's not annoying! PS in case it helps others: for macOS10.12 + brew, I had to add: extra-deps: - MissingH-1.4.0.1 to `~/.stack/global-project/stack.yaml`
    - aviaviavi 8y ago
      Just curious, which stack resolver are you using?
      - tln 8y ago
        Whatever `brew install stack` installed... $ stack --version Version 1.7.1 x86_64 ...lots more output, skipped... That's all I know :)
    - aviaviavi 8y ago
      Also not at all, I think a docker container is a good idea :D I'll probably just upload some binaries to start, but that's a good next step
TomK32 8y ago
just like `rake notes` in my rails apps which also lists FIXME and OPTIMIZE. https://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/command_line.html#rails-notes https://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/command_line.html#rails-n...
pokstad 8y ago
Very cool. Go already has the notion of custom notations in comments for handling todos and bugs. I wrote about it here: http://pokstad.com/2018/07/26/gonotes.html http://pokstad.com/2018/07/26/gonotes.html
pvinis 8y ago
This looks pretty cool, I'll try it. If you use Xcode, this link has a pretty nice script you can add as a Build Phase, and it generates warnings out or TODOs. https://crunchybagel.com/xcode-todo-warnings-swift https://crunchybagel.com/xcode-todo-warnings-swift
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
exabrial 8y ago
Maven has a similar plugin: https://www.mojohaus.org/taglist-maven-plugin/ https://www.mojohaus.org/taglist-maven-plugin/ Example: https://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-project-info-reports-plugin/taglist.html https://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-project-info-reports-...
rekwah 8y ago
If you happen to use Probot, there's a plugin that supports automatic issue creation. * https://probot.github.io/ https://probot.github.io/ * https://github.com/JasonEtco/todo https://github.com/JasonEtco/todo
messe 8y ago
Neat idea! I might throw something like this together for myself in awk for command line use.
- aviaviavi 8y ago
  Just an fyi, toodles has a CLI command if you pass the `no_server` flag, might save you some coding.
vim-guru 8y ago
I made the very same thing years ago. I remember ending up removing the web-interface and use the CLI and vim-wrapper instead. I still think the syntax of the comments etc was pretty good http://hkjels.github.io/ntask/ http://hkjels.github.io/ntask/
faizshah 8y ago
There's a pretty nice implementation of this sort of idea in atom (I only played with it tho): https://imdone.io/ https://imdone.io/
hkai 8y ago
TODO FIXME write an insightful comment here
LeonB 8y ago
This is great. Aaaaand here’s a Microsoft patent covering it: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?patentnumber=6,748,582 http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?patentnumber=6,748...
- jeremycw 8y ago
  Seems like it only covers live updates to tasks during "interactive coding sessions". So I don't think it would apply to offline source processing.
- mgalgs 8y ago
  Wow... Out of curiosity, how did you find this?
  - LeonB 8y ago
    Someone left it as a comment on my blog 10 years ago when I talk about Todo driven programming. I remembered this happening.

151 points by aviaviavi 8y ago

tln 8y ago

Looks interesting! I'm looking forward to trying it. The annotation syntax looks powerful but do people really edit thier code to adjust priorities and assignees? On a related note, I review `TODO` in PRs and consider whether to allow them in the codebase; and `DEBUG` to indicate code that shouldn't even be checked in. Does anyone else have a codetag for this? DEBUG doesn't seem to be a well-known codetag, and I'd prefer to use something other people use.

aviaviavi 8y ago
> Does anyone else have a codetag for this? DEBUG doesn't seem to be a well-known codetag, and I'd prefer to use something other people use. My team now uses `TODO(#pr)`. The #pr tag meaning it should be taken care of in this pull request, but I don't think that's common. Though maybe if toodles gets some use it will become more common :)
- 0xffff2 8y ago
  Do you open PR's before you start writing code? How do you know what number to fill in?
  - aviaviavi 8y ago
    Ah sorry that was a little confusing. "#" signifies a tag / label in toodles, so #pr means adding the literal "pr" tag to the todo. So we're not adding a PR number.
camtarn 8y ago
We used FIXME to denote temporary changes that shouldn't be checked in, or sections which hadn't been written yet, and had a Git hook which stopped code being committed with that tag. (It also looked for 'console.log' and 'debugger' statements in our JS and blocked those, too.)
- tln 8y ago
  FIXME is definitely a recognizable codetag, I'm glad to hear other people have found a similar use.
adrianmsmith 8y ago
FWIW I have seen tag NOCOMMIT used to indicate that a commit should be rejected by a pre-commit hook. Useful when you're putting in debug logging statements you want to remove later, or hard-coding your own credentials during development with the intent on making them configurable later, etc.
- tln 8y ago
  Exactly! Thank you

ckluis 8y ago

It would be handy if github, gitlab, vs baked this kind of solution directly into their tooling to help expose todos in open source software

aviaviavi 8y ago
Oh that's a cool idea - Maybe there's an opportunity extend this into a github/gitlab/etc plugin. I'll look into that!
- ckluis 8y ago
  Actually, if you did that you could create your own "open source todos" site that had links to todos in source code for popular projects
dewey 8y ago
https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13682#note_111441145 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13682#note_11...
TranceMan 8y ago
I remembered this popped up a while ago: https://github.com/naholyr/github-todos https://github.com/naholyr/github-todos Not used it myself
mmgutz 8y ago
[ticgit](https://github.com/schacon/ticgit https://github.com/schacon/ticgit) might be a better kind of solution

newhouseb 8y ago

We used something like this on the teams I lead at Dropbox to (what I felt) was great effect. We had a script that would regularly run and sync with Phabricator, our bug tracking tool of choice. One thing that we did differently, however, was to "assign" TODOs based on project or team rather than individual people. This way we could triage issues more flexibly to people according to their workloads and also build in more immunity to organizational change (when I was around we still had TODOs for the founders -- ten years in!).

aviaviavi 8y ago
Very cool! Assigning to teams definitely makes sense. I built this to help organization at a 4 person company so hopefully we'll grow enough to one day exercise that strategy :)
ryandrake 8y ago
> One thing that we did differently, however, was to "assign" TODOs based on project or team rather than individual people. If this works for your team, that’s awesome, but beware, I think you’d need a very disciplined team with good communication for this to work. I’ve found on some teams, if a task is not assigned to a single individual, nobody feels “on the hook” to do it. Things assigned to a group can tend to pile up un-looked-at, because everyone thinks someone else will take care of them. You can fix this by having some kind of rotating duty, where people pick up ownership of issues on some schedule but if you’re going that far might as well just assign directly from the start.
- newhouseb 8y ago
  Right, we would triage these TODOs as part of a larger cadence once every week (or maybe every other?... it was a while ago). If a given TODO was both important and urgent, someone would be specifically assigned to address it.
- tijs 8y ago
  * differentiate between backlog and ready for development: (bi)weekly triage * bugs first, then code reviews, then features * order features by priority; PM? Triage as well? * work ready for development list top to bottom Looks like the tags and keyvals could cover some of that. Maybe a bit hard to express priority (or change it). Would be neat if changes in the dashboard would update the todos in your code (bit scary though)

amelius 8y ago

Off topic, I'm looking for a solution to embed SVG diagrams directly in my code as comments, with the ability to edit them as in inkscape.

alanbernstein 8y ago
This sounds ambitious, but I imagine emacs can do it. Is that a feasible approach for you?

mockingbirdy 8y ago

Neat! We use a TODO.md, but this solution can keep track of the exact position. Looks very useful. If there's a way that the developers can run it without installing the Haskell suite (maybe binary releases for Windows, Linux, macOS), we will try it. Does it ignore paths like node_modules/ and others or support command line arguments for that?

aviaviavi 8y ago
> If there's a way that the developers can run it without installing the Haskell suite (maybe binary releases for Windows, Linux, macOS), we will try it. Great, I was waiting for someone to ask for a binary distribution before actually going ahead and setting it up. I'll go ahead and do that then. > Does it ignore paths like node_modules/ and others or support command line arguments for that? Yes, you set a list of regexes per project for toodles to ignore.
- tln 8y ago
  Yes, I'm halfway through installing on my Mac, it'd be much easier to use a docker container or pre-built binary :) I created an issue suggesting a docker container, hope that's not annoying! PS in case it helps others: for macOS10.12 + brew, I had to add: extra-deps: - MissingH-1.4.0.1 to `~/.stack/global-project/stack.yaml`
  - aviaviavi 8y ago
    Just curious, which stack resolver are you using?
    - tln 8y ago
      Whatever `brew install stack` installed... $ stack --version Version 1.7.1 x86_64 ...lots more output, skipped... That's all I know :)
  - aviaviavi 8y ago
    Also not at all, I think a docker container is a good idea :D I'll probably just upload some binaries to start, but that's a good next step

TomK32 8y ago

just like `rake notes` in my rails apps which also lists FIXME and OPTIMIZE. https://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/command_line.html#rails-notes https://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/command_line.html#rails-n...

pokstad 8y ago

Very cool. Go already has the notion of custom notations in comments for handling todos and bugs. I wrote about it here: http://pokstad.com/2018/07/26/gonotes.html http://pokstad.com/2018/07/26/gonotes.html

pvinis 8y ago

This looks pretty cool, I'll try it. If you use Xcode, this link has a pretty nice script you can add as a Build Phase, and it generates warnings out or TODOs. https://crunchybagel.com/xcode-todo-warnings-swift https://crunchybagel.com/xcode-todo-warnings-swift

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

exabrial 8y ago

Maven has a similar plugin: https://www.mojohaus.org/taglist-maven-plugin/ https://www.mojohaus.org/taglist-maven-plugin/ Example: https://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-project-info-reports-plugin/taglist.html https://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-project-info-reports-...

rekwah 8y ago

If you happen to use Probot, there's a plugin that supports automatic issue creation. * https://probot.github.io/ https://probot.github.io/ * https://github.com/JasonEtco/todo https://github.com/JasonEtco/todo

messe 8y ago

Neat idea! I might throw something like this together for myself in awk for command line use.

aviaviavi 8y ago
Just an fyi, toodles has a CLI command if you pass the `no_server` flag, might save you some coding.

vim-guru 8y ago

I made the very same thing years ago. I remember ending up removing the web-interface and use the CLI and vim-wrapper instead. I still think the syntax of the comments etc was pretty good http://hkjels.github.io/ntask/ http://hkjels.github.io/ntask/

faizshah 8y ago

There's a pretty nice implementation of this sort of idea in atom (I only played with it tho): https://imdone.io/ https://imdone.io/

hkai 8y ago

TODO FIXME write an insightful comment here

LeonB 8y ago

This is great. Aaaaand here’s a Microsoft patent covering it: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?patentnumber=6,748,582 http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?patentnumber=6,748...

jeremycw 8y ago
Seems like it only covers live updates to tasks during "interactive coding sessions". So I don't think it would apply to offline source processing.
mgalgs 8y ago
Wow... Out of curiosity, how did you find this?
- LeonB 8y ago
  Someone left it as a comment on my blog 10 years ago when I talk about Todo driven programming. I remembered this happening.