My Code Directory

So after a couple of weeks, I've managed to remain mostly clean. A couple of observations:

• It's crucially important to keep the Downloads folder clean. This means finding a more permanent home for downloaded files quickly or throwing them into the trash. The "broken window" impact of having a anything-but-empty Downloads directory is higher than I expected.
• Similarly, a strictly controlled Documents directory is crucial. I have "Presentations", "Virtual Machines", and "jQuery Doc Files" (for my book).
• Applications has turned out to be more difficult than I expected. There's a fine balance between keeping commonly used things at the top-level and keeping the top-level relatively small. Obviously, this is mostly obviated by LaunchBar, but part of this project is about making it a lot easier for me to understand what is on my system, so having a global trash bin isn't really acceptable, even if it's easy to rummage in it.
• It's very hard to control what gets installed in the system. I've tried to install as much as possible via MacPorts, just because I know I'll be able to uninstall it later.
• I've been using Adium for IRC, AIM, GTalk, and Twitter. Even though it's not as good as the special-purpose tools for IRC or Twitter, there's a lot of value in keeping everything in a single app, and being able to combine IRC users with their GTalk counterparts is a nice side-effect that has started to pay off over time. I definitely don't expect everyone to do this (especially for Twitter), but I'd recommend playing with it and see if having all of your contacts in a single place is a win for you :)
• Incidentally, part of what makes Adium for Twitter doable for me is Cotweet, which sends me a batched email every so often of the @wycats mentions on Twitter.

What about my code directory?

• I divided the top-level into two directories: active and vendor. The active directory is for the projects I'm actively working on and have commit (or a fork).
• That includes: rails, merb, rubygems, gem_resolver, and evented_jquery (private for now).
• My vendor directory includes git or hg repos I'm watching and use frequently. Under vendor, I have a java directory, which includes the davinci project, jruby, jvmscript, ruby2java, and Rhino.
• Right under vendor, I have adium, bespin, jquery, macports, matzruby, and rubymacros.

This may or may not scale over time, but again, it has the pleasing property of being able to determine, at a glance, what's going on in my code directory for some aspect of my work. So far, organizing things reasonably well has helped me a lot to find what I need when I need it in the appropriate context.