Traders have "AUM", which is an acronym for Assets Under Management. I found it interesting to measure my "LOCUM"... that is, my Lines of Codes Under Management.
I am writing software for my own hobby for a long time. It started long ago with small macOS Dashboard widgets. But it all ended up in a large macOS (+iPad) pro app called iObserve (v1). Since I started to port that app to the web, into a Vue.js webapp with a Django RESTful backend, using my own open-sources libraries, things became slightly more complicated.
But how complicated? This morning, I made a quick table of my projects, and counting the lines of codes for each of them (using the powerful cloc tool).
I discarded the code for demo projects, concentrating solely on source code. Moreover, I ignored code that I didn't write myself, but that is sometimes included in my projects.
So here it is: 23 projects, and about 156 kilo-cloc. Not bad. That macOS app is still quite imposing, but account only for a half of the total now. What is interesting that spliting key components into dedicated and smaller projects make indeed easier to develop these specific items, making then more powerful. But still, it increases the overall complexity, isn't it?
To me, working on these projects is like having a big city of my own, and walking accross the streets I've built. There is a down town where I spend a lot of time, sometimes spending hours to have buildings straight and well aligned (read: make unit tests). There are suburbs I need to travel to sometimes, to check something, or bring something back. There are also cosy places I am happy to stumble upon again, and others which are less welcoming because I know I can't ignore the fact it must be rebuilt, or refreshed, or updated.
And you? How many LOCUM do you have? What does it teach you?
(Cover Image Credits: https://unsplash.com/photos/pTCcJSBOTxY)
Top comments (2)
I really liked your city-analogy.
I like your metaphor with your project as a city!