[nucleardog]

I started a job where two months in I assigned myself the task of cleaning up one of the major codebases. In the span of about three weeks I collected a bunch of metrics, parsed through a bunch of logs, customized some static analysis tools to fit in with a bunch of non-idiomatic stuff we were doing everywhere… and deleted most of the codebase.

For about a week my daily standup would be something along the lines of “I deleted 34,000 lines of code yesterday.”

In the end I think I threw away about 200k lines out of 350k.

In the span of the next few months I think we ended up identifying one method I’d removed that was still in use.

And qu’elle-surprise, the team’s velocity picked way up, people were suddenly way more willing to make bigger changes or even refactor, etc. People just really needed to get picked up out of the hole far enough that they could see the light and they ran with it from there.

It never became _good_ code, but it became much more manageable. Even if you can’t justify good code for the sake of good code, code good enough to actually be worked on is a must.