Bare metal
I love food. There is something deeply human about sharing a meal, whether at home or in a restaurant. Some restaurants that I love have a view into their kitchen. Have you ever seen the kitchen at a good restaurant? One thing you may find surprising is how clean it is at all times. I mean I love to cook, but often after I am done cooking there is a mess to clean up. The restaurant kitchen is spotless. And then they clean it again at the end of the day! It is not just because they are all obsessed with cleanliness. Turns out that cleaning the kitchen is a safety issue.
Lawyer Lunch
There was a restaurant in Philly that I really liked. Their kitchen was invisible to the public. And apparently it was not as clean as the ones from the previous paragraph. But the dim sum was amazing. It was so amazing that a bunch of lawyers decided to throw their lawyer event at this place. Well unfortunately a bunch of them got real sick. That restaurant was gone faster than a dereferenced object gets picked up by the Java garbage collector (like a week or two)
Keep the kitchen clean
So why are we talking about this on my software blog? Is it lunch time and I am hungry during this post? Maybe. You have a little kitchen called the code base. My friends, if you do not keep that kitchen clean, the kinds of things that will grow and fester there will be straight out of an episode of Kitchen Nightmares. You touch one of these files and your CI/CD pipeline will light up like a Christmas tree. And if that is happening a lot already and you just let it go, then your organization is now a part of Operation Ignore. Once your team joins Operation Ignore, things get bad fast. So when you work on this code base and you are done cooking, please, please clean the kitchen. Delete all that code that is not being used. Fix the warnings in the file you touched. Your team and your future self will thank you.