Codeslinger

A bit ago (around 5 years at this point), a relatively senior manager said something interesting to me, in the context of a software company. I had just started working in a new area, effectively, and this person was a senior director in charge of all software development efforts for that part of the company. He said (and paraphrasing, to be clear): "we want to ensure that we do not have any extra code in the codebase which is not needed for what we are shipping". This struck me as somewhat odd at the time, and still resonates as counter to how I would run a software organization... and in this blog post, I'm going to try to explain why, as best I can. To start with, I suppose, this is not really a sentiment which is expressed much within smaller organizations, which had comprised the majority of my professional career to that point. In a small company, you're just trying to ship products that people want, and/or optimize your time to market, and rarely have the time ...