Less, Better Back to Journal →

Thursday, March 13, 2025

There’s this great little story from the early days of Apple. Bill Atkinson, the genius behind QuickDraw, rewrote part of the code to make it six times faster. In doing so, he deleted about 2,000 lines. When asked to report how many lines of code he’d written that week, he simply wrote: -2000.

That little moment says a lot. We’re often taught to equate productivity with doing more. More features, more lines of code, more… stuff.

But sometimes, real progress comes from taking things away. Cleaner. Simpler.

As Saint-Exupéry put it: “Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

Sometimes the most elegant algorithm starts with git rm.