Mass deleting 20,000 lines of Java code simplified my service

I mass deleted 20,000 lines of Java code last week. And it felt incredible. Here's what happened. I inherited a legacy Java service that hadn't been touched in three years. It worked, technically. But it was drowning in unnecessary abstractions — interfaces with single implementations, factories creating factories, layers upon layers that existed because someone once read a design patterns book and decided to use all of them at once. So I started removing things. Carefully, methodically, with tests backing every change. The result? Same functionality. Half the code. New team members can actually understand what it does now. This taught me something I wish I'd learned earlier in my career: writing Java doesn't mean you have to over-engineer everything. The language gets a reputation for being verbose and bloated, but that's often us, not Java. After 3 years of writing Java professionally, my biggest lesson is this — the best code I've written wasn't clever. It was obvious. It was boring. It was the code that someone at 2 AM during an outage could read and immediately understand. Good Java isn't about knowing every design pattern. It's about knowing when NOT to use one. What's the most over-engineered codebase you've ever worked on? #Java #SoftwareEngineering #Programming #CleanCode #BackendDevelopment

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Less code, fewer bugs — that’s the best refactor.

'Code that someone at 2 AM during an outage could read' - this sums it up very well 💯

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