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…

  • Daniel Quinn@lemmy.ca
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    2 months ago
    • 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.

    • N0x0n@lemmy.ml
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      2 months ago

      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.

      • Daniel Quinn@lemmy.ca
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        2 months ago

        ExFAT is good for portable devices, but if you’re working with something internally, there’s no reason not to use EXT4 or NTFS.

    • stewi@sh.itjust.works
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      2 months ago

      You’ve forgotten about exFAT my dude. Nothing uses FAT32 anymore. All your usb drives will be exFAT.

      • Daniel Quinn@lemmy.ca
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        2 months ago

        That’s not been my experience. Lots of drives I’ve bought have been FAT32 out of the box.