This is a piece that I wrote for GitHub’s ReadME project about an important aspect of software maintenance: recognizing which contributions are a good fit for a project—and which are not.

The thought process applies equally well to proprietary code bases and open source projects.

Fun idea coming from Pinterest’s engineering team:

engineer Chris Lloyd created the #dead-code-society Slack channel to be “a sombre place for remembering [—]-only diffs.” Messages are prefixed by a :tombstone: and include links to diffs that contain only file or line deletions.

Dead code is worth celebrating, for sure. I love deleting it even more than I love writing it.

Retired code remains in source control history to be remembered and consulted, but it no longer occupies a prominent place in our workspaces, build systems, or cognitive periphery.