In my day job I work on a team with a lot of other computer programmers. And there are many times when I need to share code with them. The official way to do this is to check the code into a source control system. However when coding a lot, I often need to just hand over a bunch of code. So I just copy the code to some place on the network where the other team members can grab the code.The problem with copying code to the network is that it is sometimes slow. My code is usually already compiled. That means there are a lot of large binary files located with my source code. The other developers do not need the binaries. They can compile the source code themselves and get the binaries if they want them. So I usually spend a lot of time going through my directories removing the binaries to speed up the copy time. That is where I got the inspiration for my latest program "Cleaner".
Now the alpha or beta version of Cleaner that I have now is not ready for distribution. It is too specialized. And I have to make code changes just to get it to clean the right folder on my computer. However I plan to generalize the problem and post it here some time in the future. I envision this to be a general purpose program to free up space on your hard drive. Yes I know hard disk space is cheap. But when you need to do things like copy the code somewhere, space becomes important.
Cleaner is a good opportunity. I need it for work so I can code it up when I am on the clock at work. But I find no reason not to share it with the world. Although my company or its customers may own the rights to Cleaner, I do not think they will exercise that right and restrict me from posting it here. I might have to check with the legal department on that. In the mean time, get ready for Cleaner coming to a web site near you.
