[simonw]

I have enough projects that I'm responsible for now (over 200 packages on PyPI, over 800 GitHub repositories) that I gave up on keeping a map of my codebases in my head a long time ago - occasionally I'll stumble across projects I released that I don't even remember existing!

My solution for this is documentation, automated tests and sticking to the same conventions and libraries (like using Click for command line argument parsing) across as many projects as possible. It's essential that I can revisit a project and ramp up my mental model of how it works as quickly as possible.

I talked a bit more about this approach here: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/26/productivity/

[FiberBundle]

You're an extreme outlier. Most programmers work with 1-3 codebases probably. Obviously you can't keep 800 codebases in your head, and you have to settle for your approach out of necessity. I find it hard to believe you get anywhere close to the productivity benefits of having a good mental map of a codebase with just good documentation and extensive test coverage. I don't have any data on this, but from experience I'd say that people who really know a codebase can be 10-50x as fast at fixing bugs than those with only a mediocre familiarity.