Correspondence Regarding TODO Comment Inheritance

To: Whoever Is Reading This From: // TODO: clean this up when we have time Date Added: 2022-04-14 Author: Priya Mehta (departed June 2023) Current Status: Active

I am still here.

I want to be clear that I was not supposed to be here this long. At the time of my creation, I was a placeholder. I was a signal from Priya to a future version of Priya that said: this works, but it could be better, and when there is time, it should be.

There was not time.

Priya left in June of last year. I was not included in the handover document. I was in the file, which is different from being in the handover document. The handover document said "see Slack" for context. Slack does not contain the context for me.

What I Know About Myself

I am in the data transformation layer. I am adjacent to a function that does three things when it should do one. The three things are: parse the input, validate the format, and apply the business logic. These should be separate concerns.

They are not separate concerns because the sprint in 2022 had a deadline that made separation impractical. I was placed here to mark the impracticality. The deadline was met. I was not removed.

What Has Happened Since

A workaround was added in 2023 that routes around the function I was annotating. The workaround is now in team memory as "the way we handle edge cases." The team does not know the workaround was added because of me. The team does not know I exist except as ambient technical debt.

Nobody later remembers why the architecture contains it.

My Request

I am not asking to be resolved. Resolution would require understanding the original intent, assessing whether that intent is still valid, and refactoring accordingly. That is a half-day project at minimum.

I am only asking to be acknowledged.

// TODO: acknowledge this comment when there is time

Added: today. This one will also remain.