The Best Code I Ever Wrote Was the Code I Deleted
I have written a lot of code. Hundreds of thousands of lines across dozens of projects over twenty years. Some of it was clever. Some of it was elegant. Some of it solved hard problems in interesting ways. The best code I ever wrote was none of that. The best code I ever wrote was the code I deleted. A function that turned out to be unnecessary. A feature that nobody used. An abstraction that added complexity without adding value. A clever solution to a problem we did not actually have. Each deletion made the codebase better in a way that no addition could match.