For most of college, I’ve kept it simple: I’d create a directory in my home folder for each project, then eventually move older or inactive ones into ~/programming/. When I change devices or hit file size limits, I’ll compress and send things to my NAS.
This setup has worked pretty well so far. But now that I’m graduating and my projects keep stacking up, I’m starting to wonder if there’s a more efficient system out there.
Curious—how do you all organize and store your projects? Any tips or methodologies that have made your lives easier over time?
The only person I’ve talked to about this is my mentor who’s been programming since the 60s (started on the IBM 1620 and Bendix G15) and he just mostly keeps projects in directories in his home directory and uses his godly regular expressions skills to find things that way. Makes me wonder if I’m overthinking it…
When I change devices or hit file size limits, I’ll compress and send things to my NAS.
Whaaatt!?!!? That sounds like you don’t use git? You should use git. It is a requirement for basically any job and there is no reason to not use it on every project. Then you can keep your projects on a server somewhere, on your NAS if you want else something like github/gitlab/bitbucket etc. That way it does not really matter about your local projects, only what is on the remote and with decent backups of that you don’t need to constantly archive things from your local machine.
Yeah I think a local Git server would be good, will try our forgejo since people seem to like it— I’ve been using git for a lot of projects but not so much for large files and HW stuff since when using GitHub there are size limitations. Does seem like it would be freeing to be able to delete whatever I want from my workstation without worrying about losing stuff
Size limitations? In git?
What is the average size of your source code files?
Normally you’d never run out of space in git unless you’re committing large binary files.
I used to be put everything in ~/Programming at the top level. I later started grouping projects by type (JVM, Web etc.) in subfolders because it was getting hard to find things. This was synced with Nextcloud. However, I then at some point passed 2 million files (200GB) in said folder and decided to search for a better solution.
I ended up using a selfhosted Forgejo instance. It allows for easy code searching across all projects, tagging projects by topic and language, LFS, and has useful project management tools built-in.
I’ve seen a lot of talk about large file sizes. How can you realistically reach 200GB in text? That’s around 2*10^11 characters. Or do you guys store something else as well, like sqls of data or pictures/textures/models?
It consisted of tensors weights, datasets (which can reach several gigabytes), images, 3d models, and roughly 250+ programming projects with binaries, git without LFS and also a lot build files.
Nextcloud was able to sync it all, but syncing was getting so slow that I had to keep my new laptop running for almost an entire day to get all synced to it. It also wasn’t that great at excluding certain folders (like build cache folders or NPM package files), you would have to set up exclusions on each device separately. Another problem with Nextcloud sync was that it would sometimes duplicate projects after had been moved in a subfolder.
Similar question was recently asked here
Generally what I’ve seen work well in my career and is consistent across thousands of devs I’ve worked with:
~/[whateverFolderNameYouWillRemember]/[organization]/[project]I recommend when it comes to finding things to just use a fuzzy finder, such as fzf.
Building on this, I recommend zoxide instead of only fzfing or regexping.
For people who like to keep everything they ever create, like college students, you can use
z 18.04/1to get to a directory like~/hw/random-school/fresh-1/analysis-18.04/pset1.Lets you nest without fear.
(Also, about your question: I’ve personally used
~/git/<projname>/and~/git/<org>/<projname>at the same time – e.g.~/git/aur/fuzzel-git)