Organizing hundreds of personal and example projects?

Question

How do you organize projects when you have hundreds of them? Not layout within a project, but layout of the project root directories.

I'm consolidating a decade+ of personal and example projects that are scattered all over the disks on several systems, and am looking for some organizational method that will let me keep the dozen or so active projects visible, and the archived projects findable.

Most of the projects are learning experiments, cutting across bunch of different language and frameworks. Some of the projects are full-fledged, working applications that I reach into to reuse ideas and code.

I'm using a flat namespace in a remote git repository for my personal stuff, but that seems like a less than ideal way of organizing things on my development systems. There must be something better than ~/active/ and ~/archive/.

What works for you in this situation?

Answer 1

Leave it as it is. You organization or absence of such is a history. Keep it.

Maybe create a few directories to organize stuff in chronological order, years and maybe months of you were that creative.

Answer 2

These are all personal preferences but maybe one of these will help you

1. I always keep a "temp" or "POC (proof of concept)" folder for examples and things I'm just trying out

2. I always use an Archive folder for those projects that I know I will not need

3. I try to keep projects grouped by technology (other than my main technology) so I'd have a Silverlight folder, Flex folder, C++, etc..

4. I always have a Tutorials folders for things I've downloaded from the internet or other users.

Answer 3

I break my personal projects down into the following categories and sub categories. The hierarchy of categories is then translated into a file system structure.

• Long Term Projects

  Projects which I plan to either have multiple versions of or multiple branches going at the same time. Essentially anything that I will be using for more than 6 months or so

• CLR Based Code

  I used to further break this down by language. But I have so many mixed language projects now that I don't do this anymore. It just makes it more confusing./li>

• Java
• C++
• Everything Else