Of the countless tips and tricks I have learned over the years, none is more valuable than a personal code repository. We put so much time and effort into our source code it only makes sense to reap the benefits as long as possible. That is made possible by keeping track of what we have done and how to grab it for future use.
Personal Code Repository Challenges
One of the most significant challenges for a personal repository is maintaining access to your code. When a project wraps up, or a job is left, the source often ends up behind walls. Those are walls we might be able to overcome with a request, but that takes time. We do not want to wait very long to grab past snippets. Instead, we want them at our fingertips. To achieve this, we need to have that code readily available. Fortunately, this is becoming easier to accomplish with the wide availability of USB drives and cloud services.
Improve Quality and Productivity
Code reuse has been a favorite goal for decades. A personal code repository is not the cleanest way to achieve this goal. We are not looking at extending code as much as copy and pasting it. However, we can reuse our past code through this method and improve its quality with each use. Every cycle that includes that code will consist of at least some testing and clean-up. We may even gain time to enhance comments and documentation as well. These incremental changes will prove to provide a reliable and quick solution for future projects. Thus, we deliver better code faster. What further arguments are needed to start implementing this today?
