I deleted 4,000 linesof code and nobody noticed

The best pull request of my career was almost entirely red. Four thousand lines, gone, and not a single bug report afterwards.

It started with a feature flag nobody remembered adding, guarding a feature nobody remembered using. One question led to another, and the whole module turned out to be unreachable.

Deleting is a feature

Code you remove can never break, never need a security patch, and never confuse a new teammate. It is the cheapest maintenance there is.

These days I keep a little list of things I suspect we can delete. It is my favourite backlog.