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this is definitely one of the advice i give to senior dev i work with: if you're proud of how smart your solution is, there's a high chance you overengineered and made a mess of a simple problem.

i now take great pride when my code looks boringly obvious.

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Related: my favorite pull requests are the ones that remove more lines of code than they add. People think you need to hoard old code that’s not used anymore like it’s made of gold. It’s not. You aren’t gonna need it, and if you do, you can find it in the git history.

I push that so hard. Put the removal in an isolated, clearly named commit that will be easy to search later, tag that commit so it never gets garbage collected, then take a deep breath and say goodbye.

You'll be better off without it and 99.9% of the time you won't have to retrieve it later anyway.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry — 'Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.'

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