How do you organize your projects?

I've been working on a lot of side projects or small apps lately, and I feel like they're all just scattered about - between Codepen, Glitch, Netlify, my own webhost, etc.

It's made me wonder how other people organize or keep track of their apps, and what the best way to kind of "clean up" after myself is!

Comments

[Cécile Lebleu]

One big folder for everything. In there I have 3 main structures.

• All active, important projects get each their own folder.
• All tests, small projects, and other small stuff go in one big “Lab” folder.
• All the completed or finished projects, and also the abandoned projects (or as I like to call them, “Life Lessons”) go into yearly collections/archived. Then, if I’m trying to find an old exercise or a project made back in X year, I can go in and search for it.

What I like about this system is that it allows me to close any projects that don’t spark interest any more or that I finished, and as my main priorities are always visible first, I can focus on more important or relevant projects. I like to forget about projects, and then dig them back up with new eyes, to continue working on them; so I really like archiving what didn’t work and what I’ve already shipped.

Oh and even though some projects have their own git repositories, the whole parent folder is backed up to the cloud constantly.

[Ben Halpern]

I like this

[Cécile Lebleu]

Yay! I’m glad. It’s a system that works for me and ~5 years of design and dev projects, tests, exercises, courses, and crazy inventions. I would make a post about this, do you think it would be interesting or useful for other people?

[Eoin Murphy]

Yes! 🙌

[Devang Hingu]

i read that your post about project structure and it's amazing

[Cécile Lebleu]

Thanks Devang!

[Marc de Ruyter]

Hi, which cloud backup do you use for that? Automatically?

[Cécile Lebleu]

I have iCloud set up to back up automatically.

However, I've noticed that iCloud really doesn't get along with Git. iCloud prefers large individual files, so having lots of small files constantly changing often takes up a lot of resources to back it all up.

To fix this, I have set up another folder, outside of iCloud, to keep my npm and Git projects. Then I have two ways of backing that up: GitHub (or similar) would be the obvious choice, but I prefer to keep most of my projects private (I'm just not so used to GitHub yet); every once in a while I zip up the project folder and move the zip to the main projects folder in iCloud. Then it backs up automatically as one large file.

I'm still figuring out the backup system. My next plan is to try out Dropbox, see if it gets along with Git. Otherwise, I might as well just get the projects onto GitHub. I'm not sure yet; but for now, this system works for me! :)

[Marc de Ruyter]

Thanks for your reply.
I am also figuring out a good way to use github / cloud backup.
With github, you have to really pay attention to your .gitignore, but you already knew that :)

[Matei Adriel]

Also, github private repos are free now;)

[Brett Schmidt]

I liked AWS S3 for full back ups. S3 Sync maintains all the git goodness.

[Cécile Lebleu]

By the way, I made a whole post about this in case you're interested!

How I manage my projects, folders, and files

Cécile Lebleu ・ Jun 18 '19 ・ 4 min read

#productivity #tutorial

[Mike Lockhart]

Awesome. GitLab has private repos, or if you don't want something like GitHub / GitLab, try out Keybase, which has an encrypted filesystem (online only, doesn't synch like iCloud or Dropbox) and git integration. They use AWS for their backing store, currently 250G I think

keybase.io/docs/git/index

[Ben Halpern]

I try to go fairly flat with my folder structure. One big folder called dev, which covers pretty much anything. Each folder therein usually maps to a git repo.

[Francisco Quintero 🇨🇴]

Same approach. My folder is named ~/projects/ instead.

[Greg Ruminski]

Ben, I am curious about "maps to a git repo". Does the folder contain symlinks or was it a figure of speech?

[Antonio Radovcic]

By level of seriousness:

1. Folder on desktop (let's try this idea)
2. Folder in Dropbox (I think I'm keeping this)
3. Local Git-Repo in Dropbox (This is going somewhere..)
4. Private GitHub-Repo (LET'S DO IT)
5. Public GitHub-Repo (Rarely)

[Fulton Browne]

I use GitHub to store and organize my code i have a main branch and three test branches i use to test multiple ideas simultaneously. to test builds i use circleci and azure pipelines. to keep stuff organized i pin the repos i am working on and create projects and reminders in azure boards to keep me organized and up to date. make note and reminder with onenote, evernote , or something similar to keep track of what needs to be done and how to do it. also clean out unnecessary commits and TODOS. hope this helps!

[Francisco Quintero 🇨🇴]

In all computers I work on there is a projects folder in the user's folder:

# Linux Mint

/home/cesc/projects/

# Mac

/Users/[macuser]/projects

Then, I'd usually add a folder per project and as time has passed, many of them have been grouped into bigger initiatives named after two fictional companies I own ~/projects/devaspros-projects/, etc.

Every project would normally have a github/bitbucket repo. Even smaller ones. I never miss a change to practice git commit often.

In the end, those projects are used to be showcase when applying to other companies or to show teammates how something was done.

Finally, I also find myself making a Trello board per project to organize tasks, paste links for concepts/answers/solutions while working on those tasks, and comments to myself. Kind of a self-documented process.

[Florian Rand]

Hi Desi, if this makes you feel better, I have a collection of projects spreaded between GitHub, Gitlab, different machines at home, pen drives... And some place I don't remember

[Christopher C. Johnson]

Everything goes into a git repo on GitHub, public or private, and get its own page in Notion.

If it's client work I tend to use Azure DevOps which used to be called Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) which was basically an online version of TFS (Team Foundation Server).

Yay history lessons.

[Jason Ormes]

I develop using virtual machines so everything from a project goes inside and doesn't mix with others.

[Pacharapol Withayasakpunt]

I really suggest /projects/ folder with Docker, but using VirtualBox-managed VM is fine too.

[Itachi Uchiha]

Do you have any example like screenshots? I really need these kinds of environments.

[Jason Ormes]

I don't know if screenshots would help much. I use Linux as my primary workstation so I just did some googling to figure out how to install KVM(Virtualization software) then downloaded Ubuntu and installed it. I do my work inside the graphical environment with whatever tools I need at the given moment. doing it this way I start with a clean slate every time.

[Itachi Uchiha]

Okay, thanks. I need to do this.

[Jason Ormes]

one thing that does make it faster for me is that I created a virtual machine with all my most common tools...editors, browsers, compilers..etc and then I just clone it when I am setting up a new project.

[Jason Ormes]

Let me know if you get stuck on anything and I can try to help you through it.

[Itachi Uchiha]

Thanks :) I decided to use GNOME Boxes.

I installed it :)

I didn't want to deploy my projects to my machine.

Did you use it? If so, how can access a virtual machine IP from my machine.

Thanks :)

[Jason Ormes]

I have not but it looks to just be a front end for kvm. If you type ifconfig in your virtual machine you should be able to use the address to access it from your host machine.

[Itachi Uchiha]

Okay :) Thanks. I'll try :)

[Mehdi Shahdoost]

I have a below structure for managing my projects and resources:

workspace/
workspace/ebooks
workspace/projects
workspace/projects/personal
workspace/projects/experimental
workspace/projects/[projectName]
workspace/documents
workspace/ui
workspace/ui/icons
workspace/ui/images
workspace/tools-software

[Shijie Zhou]

I think you can use tree structure to organize your job which it helps you find the project easily

Directory:

src/codepen
src/glitch
src/netlift
src/webhost
src/content
src/project