How do you keep track of your personal projects and ideas?
If you come up with this amazing idea how do you write it down? Notepad? Some text file somewhere?
How do you track your progress,etc?
I'm not talking about FogBugz,etc as they are for tracking team work, I'm talking about tracking my ideas and projects and any associated content (notes,screenshots,etc)
Can you put your solution on a thumb drive?
Any suggestions for other developers?
Backpack from 37Signals. Since it's a hosted app, you can't run it off a USB thumb drive, but I have enough connectivity these days that I haven't needed an offline solution.
I rarely write my ideas down when I first have them. Ideas are cheap. Work is expensive. And, in a personal context, metawork (work that you do to document and plan your real work in advance) is often an excuse to avoid actually sitting down and getting the real work done.
I'll occasionally sketch out an idea on scrap paper if I want to fix it in my mind. But, I generally think a new idea over, then go on to something else. The good ideas, the ones I'm actually going to maintain enough passion to complete, will fulminate to the top of my mind over and over again until I can't ignore them.
Wiki, hosted on my dev server.
Key features include:
And make backups, some people might find it liberating to lose their project list, but most of us find it devastating. And if you're running this on your devserver (all coders should have a personal devserver) you'll probably burn it down and re-install periodically and you want your projects list backed up already when you do that.
And thumb drives get lost, store it in the cloud! ;)
p.s. Confluence is a bit heavy, but some of the productive hackers I know use it as their personal wiki/ideas repository, I prefer the lighter weight options like Doku (or Tiddly if you're going for a local option)
I already have a blog, so I just put them in my blog. If I ever think of a million dollar idea that I don't want somebody to copy, I'll make it private, but that hasn't happened yet. (Or has it? mwua-ha-ha!)
I actually use a 3-ring binder to develop new ideas. I like that with paper, I can draw and make quick diagrams, and I feel more intimately connected with my new idea. A 3-ring binder allows me to group pages relating the same idea, and to use different types of paper (graph paper, lined paper, music paper) as my needs demand.
Once I am working on a project, I keep track of my development items in an Excel spreadsheet that follows Joel Spolsky's Painless Software Schedules.
I personally recommend good old pen and paper. I always carry around a small notebook because i find ideas hit me in the strangest places indeed, generally when I am nowhere near a computer.
The first place my ideas go to are usually scratch paper that I have on my desk.
After jotting a few ideas down, I will then decide whether it's worth typing it up. If I do type it up, it will be a text file or a word processor document, if I feel having formatting will benefit the expression of the idea. Then, the file will be placed into source control.
Related question:
I write the idea in a Microsoft word (well I use openoffice) document. This document contains everything such as the stack I will use, decisions made (e.g. how to persist state, caching techniques), contingency plans, and also SEO stuff.
I will move to a wiki though as I will need to store configuration information and stuff.
I keep track using a combination of technology and friends. My friends and I share a Backpack page and find it to be super helpful. Mostly we make lists of the things we want to get accomplished before the Monday of the following week.
For example, my list for this week looks like this:
Abel - Feb 2
--[Project Name]: Finish implementing design changes for game room
--[Project Name]: Implement code to prevent multiple submissions
The good thing about this system is that we can all see the what we've promised ourselves. When we slip on getting things done, our penalty is to buy a round of beer the next time we see each other. We also have reward system too. If you bang out a lot of things in 7 days, you can pull beers off your tally.
Backpack is also great because it has a pages where you can jot down ideas as well. It won't fit on a thumb drive, but at least you can access it anywhere you have an internet connection.
Nanoki (a Lua wiki) on a flashbdisk, since I work on 3 different OSs Nanoki's nice.
From here:
I use MonkeyGTD Alpha 3.0. It can easily be put on a thumb drive or used on-line from anywhere via Tiddlyspot.
MonkeyGTD is labeled as an Alpha, but it's gotten very stable over the last few months. I use it with Firefox and have not had any problems. In addition to the GTD structure, the TiddlyWiki functionality is a natural way to squirrel away useful information that's easily found later with the built-in search.
There is a learning curve, but once over it, you get hooked.
I have a small whiteboard that sits on the wall of my room. When ideas come, I use the whiteboard to draw, sketch, plan... it is very easy to delete and redraw, I can use colored markers... When I get to something that seems worth of something, I take a photo of the whiteboard and put that in the computer. Most often it remains forgotten, but if at any moment I need it (to further develop the ideas), I know where to find it.
Before I used to use paper, but I always ended up with piles of paper that eventually got thrown away, so I decided to switch to the whiteboard.
use OneNote from the office suite. It is designed to do stuff like this.