Oftent times I would find myself rumaging through old side projects trying find this piece of code that I wrote a while back. Then I would try to run and build the project, only to realize there are no instructions on how to do so and wishing that I had spent the one minute to write a quick README.
To deal with this, I recently practiced writing a simple README for each of my side projects, mostly for my future self, that includes how to setup and run the project. This is very simple and I think every project should have one. It should include things like how to setup, run, test, and deploy. Just a simple command for each would do.
An alternative to having a README that I think also works is to have some sort of go script with commands like go serve to start the app. Since I’ve been playing around with Javascript alot recently, NPM scripts in package.json work really well too. If you standardize the scripts across your projects, i.e. npm start, npm test, npm run watch:client, npm run watch:server, etc., then you won’t have to worry about how to specifically build each project.
So do your future self a favor and spend that one minute writing a README, or use scripts to make running and building your app as easy as possible.