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Comment by bcbrown | Hacker News Reader

What I like about leaving it uncompilable is that way, I know I won't forget to finish that unit of work. Sometimes I'll leave it uncompilable, sometimes I'll just leave my self a little note with what I've done, and what I have left to do.

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I'm more in this latter camp. I'll perhaps leave it completely compilable, but with logic incomplete, e.g. a stub function that always returns true. My task the next day is easy, then; it starts as finishing the stub, and as I do that, the rest starts flowing.

I've had days where I start by just running the code end to end and seeing what's egregiously broken, but I find this puts me in whack-a-mole mode the entire day and it's extremely tiring. Though, I do feel like Sherlock doing it.

Agreed in this regard. Whenever I have to leave in the computer before I have the chance to finish something, I usually just make a comment with the string `WIP` in it:

    /* WIP: make sure to initialize buffer by calling function foo() */

... the idea is that I'll remember that I left my code in an unfinished state, search for the `WIP`, get my bearings and then go off. Of course, that's easy to forget -- but impossible to forget if your WIP note is uncompilable.

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