What I learnt

I’m not a business person or senior developer, so no cheeky life lessons here.

Sometimes I feel like I’m not productive enough. Cleaning out my drive was clear proof this is not the case. I get the same realization when I uninstall unneeded packages. I should start recording my work in diary entries, so its easier to find this information.

When I manually garbage collect like this, I can be more proactive by deleting large files when I’m done with them. However, "done" might be ill defined.

What I Removed

I installed nix, a combination between a package manager and system configuration tool. I’ve solely been using it to mention project dependencies (go, python, native dependencies for projects), not systemwide packages / personal tools (ide, epub reader, music player, etc). The nix store was using ~20gb. I’m using nix-direnv to manage project dependencies as I make changes. Perhaps it failed to mark old versions of these requirements as unneeded. Perhaps I’m using the tool wrong. Either way, manually pruning my nix gc roots was easy. One project asked for a full latex distribution but did not use it.

I realized I still remained uncomfortably close to a full drive, and proceeded to clean further. I removed the following