People who perform skilled manual jobs, like carpenters, mechanics etc, often take great care and pains over their tools - cleaning and oiling, sharpening, organising etc. It occurs to me occasionally to wonder what the parallel for programmers is. Although I've been fighting the temptation for a year or two to replace the plastic housing of my laptop with something nice in polished wood, the obvious candidates are code libraries and skills.

The subjects of 'what to learn' and 'how to learn' are discussed here regularly, so the 'skills' element is fairly well covered, but does anyone have any favourite techniques, methodologies, or even better modules for maintaining, organising, indexing, 'cleaning' and storing their libraries, code examples, notes about algorithms & techniques etc?

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