Knowing when to release and deploy your code (…and a mini script)

Knowing when to release and deploy your code can turn into a complicated discussion. In general, In general, I tend to support releasing early and often, for some value of $early and $often. I’ve decided to keep this simple and introduce you to one metric that I use…

I think that I am fairly diligent in adding plenty of comments to my source code. I might even sometimes add too many. I create plenty of XXX, FIXME, or TODO tagged comments as reminders of things to work on.

To me, XXX represents an important problem that should get looked at or fixed; FIXME, reminds me that I should definitely look into something, and finally, TODO gives me homework or things to pursue when I’m in need of a new project.

I try to resolve most if not all XXX tagged comments before making a 0.1 release, FIXME’s to consider something very stable, and a lack of TODO’s mean something is completely done for now.

To count all these, I wrote a little tool that greps through the top-level directories in my ~/code/ folder, and displays the results in a table. Feel free to give it a try, and use it for your own projects.

While I don’t see this as a particularly game changing utility, it scratches my itch, and helps me keep up my bash skills. The code is available here. Let me know if you have any improvements, or if the source isn’t enough documentation for you.

Happy hacking,

James