This sums it all up pretty damn well. Beekey Cheung writes some thoughtful articles along these lines.
One thought of mine: While complexity grows over time (and we are on a constant fight between value delivered and complexity, always trying to keep our heads above water), there also come moments of solidification: Where, after a bunch of small pivots, our mental model becomes pretty clear, and we can move in and prune a lot of the bad ideas from the code because we've settled on the direction.
That's the stage when we want to fight the urge to hoard failed ideas as dead code we "might" make use of. Consistently looking for opportunities to delete code associated with pivots is probably the best way to manage this stuff over time.
Software engineer with a few years experience, as interested in how teams collaborate to solve challenging problems as much as the solutions themselves.
+100, I read something aligned to this recently and I'll badly paraphrase it here apologies to the author, "deleted code is debugged code", resisting the urge to hoard is one thing but actively pruning dead code is another
This sums it all up pretty damn well. Beekey Cheung writes some thoughtful articles along these lines.
One thought of mine: While complexity grows over time (and we are on a constant fight between value delivered and complexity, always trying to keep our heads above water), there also come moments of solidification: Where, after a bunch of small pivots, our mental model becomes pretty clear, and we can move in and prune a lot of the bad ideas from the code because we've settled on the direction.
That's the stage when we want to fight the urge to hoard failed ideas as dead code we "might" make use of. Consistently looking for opportunities to delete code associated with pivots is probably the best way to manage this stuff over time.
+100, I read something aligned to this recently and I'll badly paraphrase it here apologies to the author, "deleted code is debugged code", resisting the urge to hoard is one thing but actively pruning dead code is another
Regarding each bit of added code and complexity.
each custom line of code is managed by you - maybe badly - but managed
there is hardly ever a downside to removing code
you can usually look in git to see how it was done and cherrypick the good parts if needed