From time to time I have to cleanup my hard disk. No matter how big my partitions are, or how bigger the hard disk is, there always comes a point where I start to be dangerously close to run out of disk space.
It is In these moments when you find that you forgot to delete the WAV tracks of that CD you ripped. That you don't need to have duplicate copies of everything you may want to use from both Windows and Linux because you can keep these in an NTFS partition and Linux will be happy to use them without prejudice.
And it is in these moments when I realise how much code I've abandoned over the years. Mainly in exploratory endeavours, I've written sometimes what in retrospective seem to be substantial amounts of code.
Just looking at abandoned Eclipse and Netbeans folders I find unfinished projects from many years ago. Sometimes I recognise them instantly, and always wonder at how subjective the perception of time is: in my mind that code is fairly fresh, but then looking at the timestamps I realize that I wrote that code seven years ago. Sometimes I wonder why I even thought that the idea was worth even trying at the time.
Yet here they are: a JPEG image decoder written in pure Java whose performance is about only 20% slower than a native C implementation. A colour space based image search algorithm complete with a web front end and back end for analysis. A Python arbitration engine that can scrape websites and alert of price differences applying Levenshtein comparisons across item descriptions. Enhancements to a remote control Android app that is able to drive a Lego Mindstorm vehicle over Bluetooth. That amalgamation of scripts that read EDI messages and extracts key data from them. Like seven different scripts to deal with different media formats, one for each camera that I've owned. And many more assorted pieces of code.
The question is, what I should do with this code? I'm afraid of open sourcing it, not because of patents or lawyers but because its quality is diverse. From slightly above alpha stage to close to rock solid. Some has test cases, some does not. In short, I don't feel it is production quality.
And I can't evade the thought that everything one writes starts in that state: we tend to judge the final product and tend to think that it was conceived in that pristine shape and form from the beginning. I know that's simply false: just look at the version control history of any open source project. But I want to have that smooth finish, clean formatting, impeccable documentation and fully automated build, test and deploy scripts from day one.
Yet some of this could be potentially useful to someone, even to me at some time in the future. So it is a shame to throw it away. So it always ends up surviving the disk cleanup. And I'll see it again in a few years and make myself the same question... why not have the equivalent of the code garage? Some place where you could throw all the stuff you no longer use or you don't think are going to use again and leave it there so anyone passing by can take a look and get the pieces if he/she is interested in them?
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