# Comment in code read ‘Dear future me, sorry I wrote this’

- URL: https://talkfuse.com/story/comment-in-code-read-dear-future-me-sorry-i-wrote-this/
- Published: 2026-07-20T06:30:00+00:00
- Updated: 2026-07-20T07:13:00+00:00
- Original publisher: The Register
- Original article: https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/07/20/comment-in-code-read-dear-future-me-sorry-i-wrote-this/5274130
- Topics: Software, Technology

## Key points

- Developer secretly used C# instead of assigned VB language.
- An intermittent routing bug appeared, then vanished unexplained.
- Years later he reopened his own code and found a self-written apology.

## Summary

A former Visual Basic developer, writing under the pseudonym "Johnny" for The Register's "Who, Me?" column, recounted secretly building a project in C# instead of VB and later hitting a baffling intermittent bug. The tale illustrates a common developer anxiety: shortcuts and undocumented workarounds can resurface years later to haunt their author, particularly when institutional memory has faded and someone else, or a forgetful past self, is left to clean up the mess.

Johnny had been hired as a VB developer but considered the role beneath him, so he wrote a new project in C#, then a new language, which worked to the customer's satisfaction. A string manipulation routine controlling task routing later began failing roughly half the time; after fruitless debugging, random code changes and a revert, the fault mysteriously vanished without explanation. Years afterwards, now a senior developer, Johnny was asked to investigate the same unresolved intermittent bug and found a header comment he had written himself years earlier, reading: "Dear future Johnny, I am very, very sorry."

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