Maturing as a software engineer

We as software engineers tend to write code to solve the problems we face, the thing is that sometimes deleting code instead of writing it is the way we go.

If you can achieve the same task with less amount of code (having into account readability, of course, remember that code is written once and going to be read thousands of times, so avoid those “elegant” but unreadable at first look nasty one-liners!), there will be less lines of code to read/debug/optimize in the future by your future you (how many times did we say “What the fuck was I trying to do here?”) or your coworkers.

Great people (including the founders of StackOverflow Jeff Atwood, and Joel Spolsky) have written about this idea, so you better read them instead of reading me.

• https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-best-code-is-no-code-at-all/
• https://dzone.com/articles/you-are-not-paid-to-write-code
• https://bravenewgeek.com/not-invented-here/
• https://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000007.html