#4 Developer Mindset | The Best Code Is the Code You Delete

Hello Reader,
​Hope you are doing well!

This week, I realised something important: there are plenty of things you’ll learn from books and tutorials, but then there are the unwritten laws of software engineering. The quiet lessons you only discover by living through messy projects and revisiting your own code with a mix of pride and regret.

And one of those laws has stuck with me more than any other:

The Best Code Is the Code You Delete

When I first started, I thought growth as a developer meant writing more code. More features. More patterns. More clever abstractions.

But here's what I eventually learned: every line of code you add today becomes your responsibility tomorrow.

More code means more hidden bugs lurking in places you forgot existed. More complexity makes it harder for anyone (including future-you) to safely make changes. More cleverness just means you'll be scratching your head six months later wondering what you were thinking.

The pull requests I look back on most fondly aren't the ones where I added hundreds of lines of shiny new features. They're the ones where I removed them. Simplifying what was overcomplicated, cleaning up what had grown messy, and deleting what wasn't needed anymore.

Adding code can feel like progress. But real progress often comes from taking code away.

Dev Tip

Before you write new code, take a moment and ask yourself:

• Do we actually need this?
• Does something like this already exist in our codebase?
• What happens if I don't add it at all?

That simple pause can save you hours of work and a lot of headaches down the road.

This Week's Challenge

Find one place in your codebase where you can delete instead of add:

• Simplify that function that's trying to do too many things
• Remove a feature that nobody actually uses anymore
• Replace something fancy with something clear and boring

It doesn't need to be big. Even small deletions make your future work (and your teammates' work) so much easier.

What I'm Building

In Build With Me, this lesson has been front and center. While working on PureSignal, we kept catching ourselves overcomplicating parts of the stack. The solution wasn't to build more sophisticated features. It was to cut. Delete. Simplify.

And suddenly the app felt lighter, faster, and so much easier to move forward with.

Sometimes, the best work happens when you choose less.

Final Thoughts

Here's one of those unwritten laws of software engineering worth carrying with you: impact isn't measured by what you add, but by what you simplify.

Anyone can add more lines of code. It takes real discipline and skill to remove them.

So here's your gentle nudge for this week: go find something to delete. Then hit reply and tell me what you removed. I love hearing about these small victories that make codebases (and our lives) better.

Remember: the cleanest code is often the code that doesn't exist.

Code your way forward. 🚀
​Sahil