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Ask HN: How do you keep track of code experiments/spikes/side projects?

2 points by elcapitan ↗ HN
I guess everybody has those. I certainly have them, lots and lots of small projects where I tried out some new technology/language/framework, or implemented some small idea with it, ordid some exploration on a dataset etc. They all live with dubious names in a folder in ~/dev and over time, I just forget about them. Sometimes I accidentally find them again when doing something related (same task, different tool, or so), sometimes not.

Do you somehow keep track in a more elaborate way? Spreadsheet/database/notes?

4 comments

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withinboredom
I use InkDrop (InkDrop.app) to organize notes. I like it because it’s GH flavored markdown, and when mixed with the prettier plugin it is amazing. Everything I write down (whether it’s SQL queries or an internal doc) starts there. Every project idea starts there too. I have tags for “project phases” so I can go back and look at early thoughts of a project.

It’s not perfect, but it works for me.

elcapitan
Does this give you more than a collection of notes about the specific projects though? I'm using Joplin (MD notes with code highlighting etc) in a similar way, but it ends up just another flat collection parallel to the dev directory..
withinboredom
You can create a hierarchy of "journals" (a collection of documents, like a folder) and use tags across all journals or have per-journal tags. It's totally up to you how you organize it. You can also set a status on a document such as "on hold", "completed", "active" etc so you can see -- at a glance -- what you're working on. It's literally the best 4 bucks a month I could spend.
raxxorrax
I do the same, I have this very unstructured folder. I have Gitea running on a server, but I create a repositories quite rarely, so the folder it is for now.

Still works though if I remember that I looked into something. I wish I would take more notes though and if I do it is mostly text files withing project folders.