Remove old code, keep it clean!

I spent some time removing old repositories on my GitHub account. Why? Because as a developer I believe I must keep things organized and clean. And even if I’m not paying a cent for the hosting of such code, I don’t want to screw up people first impression bloating my repository number. Therefore I decided to keep only repositories I do really contribute to, removing also those I today participate directly. That’s it, my account deflated from around 30 repositories to 13, the half! That’s are the only repositories I do care about today, the number will grow again, but as today that’s it. What about all the other crappy code that I tried to merge into upstream repos and was laying around on my account? It is simply gone! If the code has not been merged within a few years, chances are it will never be merged. And most notably, I don’t want to keep around examples of bad code, they are useless even to me (the author).

Re-organize my local git repositories

Now, the above gave me a push in re-organizing my whole local repositories. I decided to follow these simple, or better, trivial rules:
  1. all repositories go to a ~/git folder, so I don’t have to search for them across the disk;
  2. all repositories I do contribute actively got on the first level of such directory, other repositories I simply track or use as inspiration go into a misc subfolder, so that I can keep a clear layout;
  3. all my remotes have been renamed to github, and that has always been. I do not like the name origin, it’s that simple. If the repository comes from another service, the remote is renamed accordingly, so that I can always keep an idea of where the real code is without having to parse the pull/push URLs;
  4. all tracking branches to the original repository get the remote name of upstream, so I know that when I switch to upstream I’m in the danger public zone;
  5. if the repository is not mine, but I’m one of the committer, the only remote is upstream just to remind me I’m always in the danger zone!

The article GitHub clean-up time! has been posted by Luca Ferrari on January 19, 2018