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Problems to solve?

I am working on different Projects for my current Company. There are Bigger Projects and a couple of Libraries. These Projects using different techniques and they have also different "way-to-go" for building, testing and so on.

and sometimes, if i come back to a project on them i was working weeks or months ago ... i spend too much time to get "things" running.

Problem A: what was the way to build this stuff?

all of them have also different services and they have different needs. So for example one of these using maven, other using gradle and cmake. Because they have also different technologies per Project (client - server), they also have different tool-sets. composer, nuget, npm.

if you are just have to maintain one or two Projects, then it is easy to handle the needs. but if you ever got a task for a project, on them you was working months ago... you pull the last changes, and then you run in issues while building ... and you look at these issues and something in you're mind says "i had this issue also in the past and i can't remember how i fixed these"

sometime it is just the wrong java-sdk version, sometimes you just forget that you have to start some services they are needed, and (of course) the main-team is always aware of them.

there is one thing I've learned. the documentation and the build setup is mostly in the same shape.

Problem B: I was sure i did that already. But where?

i have tried to organize all projects in a directory structure depending on project name, task/branch name. then i put also some configurations depending on local services they i have to start in different folders and named them services. in there i had all stuff like Dockerfile, helm charts and helper scripts.

this structure was growing over the last years, even i removed projects, there i was not expected to working any more. also some branches for refactorings took a while and exists besides the main branch. and they needs different setup for the services i have to start.

Solution ?

the biggest Problem by working on different Projects at different times is to remember which places are involved in the Project and the what was important to do.