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…
I keep a root folder. On Windows it’s in c:\something on Linux it’s in /something
Under there I’ve got projects organized by language. This helps me organize nix shells and venvs.
Syncthing keeps the code bases and synced between multiple computers
I don’t separate work from home because they don’t live in the same realm.
Only home stuff in the syncthing.
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)
I have a folder for my projects on root and within those projects I have my GitHub repos all contained within their own directory named the same as the project.
If I am learning something, I have a folder for the topic I am learning, and a logseq file with all of my notes. Then I have folders for my book references, one for video or audio references, and then a folder for my practice projects.
I push every project I work on right away to my gitea instance. If I expect not to work on something for some time I just delete the local copy.
When I change devices or hit file size limits, I’ll compress and send things to my NAS.
Well, that sounds inconvenient.
Yeah, I really should start using Git for everything, but I’ve been working with a lot of large datasets recently (mostly EEG data). A big part of improving accuracy comes from cleaning the data, which is huge and takes a while to process. I could set up a local Git server to keep track of everything or just save the base data files and regenerate as needed, but on my current setup, that process can take anywhere from 2-6 hours depending on the task. So for now, I’ve just been managing everything locally to save time.
git LFS might be for you. If the data takes so long to reprocess I think it is fine to check it in (possibly using LFS).
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.
On my personal computer
~/Projects/<name>, you need to remember that real-life is not like college, you won’t be working on a new project every week. If you have more stuff than you can manage like this, you’ve bitten more than you can chew.On my work computer it’s a bit more complex, because I have to work with other people’s projects as well, so I have a
~/Workfolder and in it several folders by type of stuff, e.g.opsfor operational stuff such as scripts to deploy stuff or grant permissions,codefor servers (and client) code, etc. Also if I’m working on something specific that requires multiple repos I create a folder for that project with the repos inside.~/real
~/real/cprac
~/real/git
Everything is in git, and I tend to use IntelliJ as an IDE. So my projects are all in ~/Ideaprojects/[PROJECTNAME]
I have a dedicated directory with subdirectories for each project and that’s it
Whatever Cargo generates for me. If I use workspaces, then I put the subprojects to the root of the directory.
I think this is asking about where to keep projects, not how to organize them internally.
Ah, OK. I keep them in the Documents directory.
- Keep everything in an external git service. You can use third party services like Codeberg, GitLab, or GitHub, or host your own on your NAS.
- When you’re not working on a project and don’t think you’ll need to reference it for a while, just delete it from your laptop. The code always lives in git anyway.
In terms of local storage, I usually have everything in
~/projects/project-name, and I don’t have tiny file size limits because I don’t use FAT32 filesystems — that’s the default filesystem you usually get on USB sticks and external hard drives you buy. You have to format those drives to something like EXT4 (Linux) or NTFS (Windows) or you get stuck with FAT32 which has 2gb file sizes.You’ve forgotten about exFAT my dude. Nothing uses FAT32 anymore. All your usb drives will be exFAT.
That’s not been my experience. Lots of drives I’ve bought have been FAT32 out of the box.
What about exFAT? It overcomes FAT32’s limitation and is nearly readable on every OS and has way higher file size limits.
Edit: In case of external storage like USB/hard drive.
ExFAT is good for portable devices, but if you’re working with something internally, there’s no reason not to use EXT4 or NTFS.
Devs who don’t use git and devops properly are infuriating to work with. I’d recommend getting started with that ASAP.
I think your reply would have been more useful if you’d given some pointers about how, instead of just “do it right”.
No one should be basing their “how to do it right” on a single forum comment. Talk about scope-creep for the offering of advice.
projects/[rust|cpp|python|..]/proj-nameI used to do this, but imho the used language is hardly a useful index. When does it happen that you want to see everything written python? For me that’s never.
Also where do you put multi-language projects? Like, go backend with typescript frontend or whatever.
I put stuff in places, then immediately forget where I put them.
“… and God said, let us make man in our own image.”
i use
coding/languagename/project, where most if not all projects are git repos. so,coding/python/shira,coding/java/datetime examplesi have some wildcards for the languages, most of my serverside js stuff lives incoding/node-denoand most of my fullstack webdev stuff lives incoding/webdevi used to have the coding directory on a hdd, but moving it to an ssd helped a lot when installing things made with node, among other things.
