The Joy of Deletion: What Happened When I Removed 3,000 Lines of Code
It didn’t start out as a cleanup. I was trying to fix a bug, just a small one, buried deep in a feature no one wanted to touch. The logic felt like an archaeological dig: layers of patches, old comments from devs long gone, fallbacks on fallbacks. Every fix had another fix duct-taped on top. After a few hours of tracing edge cases and odd branches, I stopped and asked the question I should have asked sooner: ...