Blog - HubSpot Product Team

My favorite kind of Subversion commit - removing dead code

Written by Yoav Shapira | Jan 23, 2010

There are only a few things that make me happier than removing old, dead code.

One of them is when a colleague beats me to it!

I always feel like dead, unused, old code is like a heavy coat around my body on a warm summer day.  I get this overwhelming desire to ditch it, throw it aside, get rid of it.

Unfortunately, it's not always easy to find or spot dead code.  As the amount of code grows large, and some of it moves into "legacy" or "just barely maintained" mode, this gets more challenging.

Even though HubSpot has only been around a little more than three years, we have some such code.  We're fairly productive at cranking out code, and not bad at refactoring when we need to (which is regularly, as in most agile organizations).  But we haven't been great at removing old / dead / unused code.

Which is why yesterday's Subversion commit, by @katzj, made my day:


Remove some old code that isn't at all relevant any more

 

As Patrick said "The last remnants of the original business model. And
code I wrote my senior year in college."

(Fri, 22 Jan 2010 18:11:25 GMT)