I Love Organizing Stuff

I love storing things and then being able to access them later. I love making the access easy.

That’s probably one of the reasons why programming speaks to me.

I love adding links between Jira tasks. Leaving knowledge breadcrumbs. Code comments. Hyperlinks.

I love refactoring code, although this can be an endless pointless circle. Nowadays, I try to delay refactoring until there’s some real-world pain to be solved.

I love being concise, though I don’t always succeed.

Storing stuff

I still have pretty much all music and poems I’ve written since I was 12. It’s not a direct lineage, sometimes I lost my stuff and had to recover a lot from DMs. But now, the setup should be pretty solid.

It’s a folder that’s synced to a managed Nextcloud instance, accessible from a browser. That folder isn’t very large, but has accumulated a lot of useful files.

I have all code that I’ve written over the last 5 years (i.e. since I started coding).

I have a dotfile repository, where I also put my scripts and various notes to help myself set up a new machine:

• a list of software to install
• a list of settings to click through
• instructions for rare occasions, such as updating a live USB

I save my shell history and browsing history. “Shell history is your best productivity tool” ¹

I have 5 years of diary in Daylio and 3 years of all my income/expenses in Excel. This is useful when we wonder or argue about something with my girlfriend 😁

Surely, I also save my documents, resumes, and medical records.

When I read an article and like it, I download it. It’s nice to be able to quickly grep (or even just manually skim) that folder when I’ve vaguely remembered a good quote or idea. I guess, googling can also work, but sometimes it doesn’t work as well in my experience. And small random blogs can disappear at any moment.

As I was creating this site, these downloaded articles also proved useful as examples of good look and feel. I guess, if I had these as a list of links/bookmarks, this would work too. The point is: keeping this list (whether downloaded or not) was useful.

I stream music rather than download it, but I have a text file with a list of around 150 of my favorite albums. It’s really convenient to share with someone who doesn’t know what to listen to, or when I’m looking for examples of a specific vibe. I want to share it here when I figure out how to integrate it best.

Of course, I have an even larger file with music that I plan to listen to. And similar ones for movies, books, and blogs.

I take pictures and write short notes/reviews of guitars, headphones, smartphones, and laptops that I own. I want to publish the guitars here at some point. On the other hand, I rarely write “normal” reviews like on Google Maps.

I probably spent too much time reordering these paragraphs.

Access

I really love the idea of having a central “hub” for my public social accounts and media, that’s why I made this site.

I always planned to eventually add a blog to it, but I didn’t have any good post ideas until I started putting together the home page with all the social links. That’s when I had this realization about its purpose and my tendency to store and organize things.

To be fair, this post has only touched on “storing” stuff, rather than “organizing” or “accessing” it. Having a structure that makes sense is very important. That’s what allows you to actually come back and use your files instead of indulging in useless digital hoarding. But I’m having trouble coming up with an underlying principle other than “have a directory structure that makes sense to you” 🤷‍♂️

Maybe, I’ll describe mine later in more detail.