Organizing, Storing, and Keeping Track of code for reuse

Question

Many moons ago I started storing my music as MP3’s. I downloaded like mad and just dumped them all into a folder. After collecting thousands of songs I had a big mess. After two years of organizing all music in my free time I have made it to “D” section of my library. I am starting to write code on a daily basis and I would like to keep a lot of what I do for reuse and future reference. I use Visual Studio a lot, and Eclipse sometimes, but I also do web development. Right now I am just have a folder on an external drive called Projects and inside that folder I have code I want to save broken down by its respective IDE and then the language it was developed in. This is working ok right now, but I fear after a few years it might get hard to navigate, and I don’t want another mess like my music library. What are some good ways to keep track of code and programming projects while also promoting easy navigation and future reuse?

Answer 1

For Mac OS X, there's the beautiful Snippets:

_{(source: snippetsapp.com)}

Also, the new Xcode 4 will have native support for custom code snippets.

Answer 2

I use a subversion repository for purpose of saving code for the future. In my repository I have the following folder structure:

\
|- Project1\
|- - Trunk\
|- - Branches\
|- - Tags\
|- Project2\
....

This is working for me and I have big and small projects that I coded on since high school in this repository. If I for instance want to port a project that I coded on Linux to Windows I create a branch that I for example call Win32-port. And when I have a 1.0 release of a project I create a tag named 1.0.

Using this method you can also set up back-up scripts and save a backup to another location. (I use a cron job and some python scripts to achieve this, but it all depends on what system the server uses.)

A book about subversion are freely available here: Link

Answer 3

It won't really solve your organising problem, but you'll be more productive anyway by using snippet be it inside Eclipse or inside Visual Studio.

Here's a short tutorial for snippet in Eclipse : http://www.dansshorts.com/post/creating-snippets-in-eclipse

And here the explanation to create them and link them to a keyword in Visual Studio 2010 : http://www.visualstudiotutor.com/2010/02/create-snippet-visual-studio-2010/

Answer 4

This would take a bit more infrastructure to set up and is more for multiple people working together, but the best approach is to start thinking of Software as a Service.

For commonly used functions, wrap them as a web service with good documentation. For instance, if you have a phone validator that seems to be constantly used across projects, it would become part of your validator service.

With few exceptions, most shops don't seem to organize/share code effectively with static document type code libraries.

This would also force you to refactor the code snippets into reusable methods instead of just random code that is copied/pasted in. It also gives you a clean seperation between the public interface and private implementation.