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Discussion on: How do you organize your projects?

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cecilelebleu profile image
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.

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

I like this

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cecilelebleu profile image
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?

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eoinmurphy profile image
Eoin Murphy

Yes! 🙌

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dizid profile image
Marc de Ruyter

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

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cecilelebleu profile image
Cécile Lebleu
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sinewalker profile image
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

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cecilelebleu profile image
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! :)

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dizid profile image
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 :)

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mateiadrielrafael profile image
Matei Adriel

Also, github private repos are free now;)

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brettsschmidt profile image
Brett Schmidt

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

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devanghingu profile image
Devang Hingu

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

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cecilelebleu profile image
Cécile Lebleu

Thanks Devang!