About this Endnote
Less is more. Less is also more effort. Is it worth it? We keep talking about incremental development, but we don't talk enough about decremental development.
When we talk about refactoring, we often speak optimistically and vaguely about improving the architecture and cleaning the code. In the real world, the main activity of any significant clean-up is throwing out and reducing. The less code you have, the less you will have to optimise, to secure, to debug, to rework, etc.; the more of a codebase you will be able to fit in your head and understand and reason about.
What can you remove? Dead code, speculative generalisations and needless abstractions. What can you reduce? Accidental complexity, verbosity and first-draft thinking now that we know better. What you do to motivate and improve decremental development? Attend this session.
About the Speaker
Kevlin Henney is an independent consultant, speaker, writer and trainer. His development interests are in patterns, programming, practice and process. He has contributed to open- and closed-source development, has been a columnist for a number of magazines and sites and has been on far too many committees (it has been said that "a committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled").
He is the co-author of 'A Pattern Language for Distributed Computing' and 'On Patterns and Pattern Languages', 2 volumes in the Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture series; and the editor of 'The 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know'. He lives in Bristol and online.
KevlinHenney