Reorganizing My Digital Workspace

Image by fulopszokemariann

I recently came across a tweet by Kyle Shook that simply read What is your coding folder called? I didn't think much about it as I'd used the same folder structure for years. After reading some of the replies it occurred to me that I really should rethink how I store my code. This is the system I came up with.

Originally I used the same pre-made layout most everyone who uses Git does with one small twist, I had a trash folder;

• Source
  • Repo
  • Where all of my projects lived
  • Trash
  • Where my short term experiments lived

I really didn't think much of it since I used one or two projects at a time. When I saw some of the more elaborate layouts it got me thinking that maybe I should organize things in such a contextual way that I could quickly find whatever I needed without much thought.

I started out by making a root folder called Dev and a clear divide between personal and professional.

Personal was sub-divided into the more common project types I tend to work with:

• Challenges
  • Things like AdventOfCode
• Exercises
  • CodeWars, Exercism, etc.
• Mentor Assignements
  • Tasks assigned to me by various mentors throughout the years
• Playground
  • Where temporary things like proof of concepts live
• Projects
  • Any active project I'm working on
  • Inactive
    • Projects I'm not working on
  • Info Projects
    • Copies of informational projects like Awesome lists, onboarding steps, workflow outlines, etc.

Professional was mostly modeled after Grant Harwood's layout:

Client, Deployment Target, Role.

professional/fooinc/site/fooinc-api, professional/fooinc/managers/fooinc-managers-fe

Though there is also a folder called Interview Code Assessments where I keep a copy of every take-home interview test I've ever done.

Lastly, there's a folder at the top directory called nuget-packages where I store local nuget packages while developing them. I find it easier to publish them all to one place so I don't have to keep track.

After I got the folders in place and everything moved over I set up a task to back up my Dev directory to an external hard drive that I leave plugged in.

I personally use FreeFileSync to manage my file backups but you could make a script and schedule it with whatever your operating system uses. Just remember to filter out node_modules. In my case, FreeFileSync can save a profile as a batch script and I use Task Scheduler to run it when I'm asleep, well when I should be asleep anyway.

Just in case you want to copy and paste the folder names here they are all together:

• personal
  • challenges
  • exercises
  • mentor-assignements
  • playground
  • projects
  • inactive
  • info-projects
• professional
  • interview-code-assesments
  • client
  • deployment-target
    • role
• nuget-packages

I hope this helps you the way it's been helping me recently.

How do you organize your code folder? Leave a comment below and let me know!