This post is nominally specific to Mac users but the same techniques, mutatis mutandis, could be used by developers on Linux and perhaps even Windows.
It’s a commonplace today that disk space is cheap and that we can operate—to a first approximation—as if we had infinite disk storage. The reality, of course, is a bit different. Our local disk space, while generous in comparison to just a few years ago, is anything but infinite and sooner or later we’re going to have to clean things up. That’s because crud—in the form of log files, old caches, and other such files—accumulate over time wasting space and making things slower.
There are, of course, programs to automate a lot of the cleansing but developers have special needs that most of those programs don’t know about. Gant Laborde has a nice post entitled How to free up space on your developer Mac that discusses some of the things developers can do to free up space on their Mac. As I said, most of his ideas translate to other Unix-like systems and perhaps—although I don’t know for sure—to Windows.
It’s surprising how many ways cruft can accumulate on your machine so it’s nice to see some techniques for getting rid of a bit of it. If you’re a developer, be sure to take a look at Laborde’s post even if you’re not a Mac user.