I Deleted 10,000 Lines of Code and the App Got Faster

"I Deleted 10,000 Lines of Code and the App Got Faster"

The angle: most dev content is about building things. This one is about the opposite — the satisfying, terrifying act of ripping out dead code, unused dependencies, and a legacy feature nobody remembers shipping.

Why it works:

• It's counterintuitive. "How do you make an app better by doing less?" That's a hook.
• Everyone's repo has rot. People will see themselves in it.
• It naturally has a narrative arc: the fear → the "what if someone's using this?" paranoia → the slow deletion → the moment it all still works → the pride.
• It's easy to make personal and funny without being a tutorial.

Suggested structure (same human voice as the last one):

1. Open mid-action — you're about to hit delete on a 4,000-line file and your hands are shaking
2. The backstory — how it got there (the "temporary" feature from 2021 that became load-bearing)
3. The fear phase — "what if this is used somewhere I don't know about?"
4. The method — how you actually verified it was safe (searching, tracing imports, checking analytics)
5. The deletion — the slow, methodical process. Small commits. The growing dread.
6. The moment it all still works — and the weird, quiet pride that comes with it
7. The numbers — lines deleted, bundle size before/after, build time before/after
8. The lesson — not "delete more code" but "the scariest refactoring is the one where you do nothing new"

It pairs well with the memory leak article as a follow-up — one is about fixing something broken, this one is about removing something that was never supposed to be there.