Preventing Temporarily-necessary Hacks from Slipping into the Final Release

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Jason Fried asked:

What techniques have you used to keep ugly temporarily-necessary hacks from slipping into your final release?

Here are some techniques we've used:

  1. Wrap comments in a script which hides the selection based on IP address. In other words, machines outside our network are served pages without comments rendered-in.

    The advantage of this is that the notes can stay, even if the page is live.

  2. Add something like '[todo][Danny]' at the beginning of each comment.This can only be trusted as long as the person with responsibility for making the work live knows to check for this terminology. Fortunately we have a pre-publication checklist which includes this check.

Partially written by a human

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