"Code for life" is a big part of my philosophy. Over the years, I've found that one of the biggest obstacles was code-loss due to various causes, not the least of which is just losing interest and forgetting where everything is.

The only defense against this seems to be the two-fold approach of getting your code into more than one place, and being able to rapidly reproduce your code execution environment. For getting it into more than one place, I take many lines of defense: making Levinux so small that it's easy to copy, partitioning the hard drives so that syncing an entire virtual machine over Dropbox is still fast and efficient... and finally, distributed version control.

I've found in my work with git and Mercurial, workflow is totally transformed always for the better. And while neither git or vim are technically part of the code execution stack, they are both fundamental to what I'm trying to teach. I'm taking some creative license in how I define a stack :-)