Deleted code. Removal of requirements. It's wonderful, letting it go.
What is the most beautiful / highest quality code you've seen (or written)?
11–19 of 19 posts
Re: What is the most beautiful / highest quality code you've seen (or written)?
#12The best system I ever worked with looked incredibly simple. Small, clear functions. Lots of "set a few variables, run some if statements." Incredibly unassuming, humble code. But it handled 10s of millions of transactions per day elegantly and correctly. Every weird edge case or subtle concurrency bug or whatever else you could think of had been squeezed out of the system. Everything fit together like LEGO blocks, s…
Was it written by one person?
The majority of it, yes.
Re: What is the most beautiful / highest quality code you've seen (or written)?
#13It is not open source, but I am still proud of a message delivery system I designed and built alone two years ago. It consists of six independent components and guarantees at least one successful delivery as long as the database remains available. It supports AWS SES, Twilio SMS and MMS, Webhook, Discord messages, and can easily add new providers through an adapter pattern.
Messages are queued through an API, captured by Debezium, produced to Kafka, delivered by workers, logged, and updated through DSNs received via webhook. Failures go to a DLQ where they are retried until the limit is reached.
Each stage runs independently, so any failure only causes minor delay without risking unintended drops. With Prometheus metrics in place, this system has processed more than two hundred thousand messages per day in production for two years without a single reported loss.
Re: What is the most beautiful / highest quality code you've seen (or written)?
#14Deleted code. Removal of requirements. It's wonderful, letting it go.
Code that doesn't exist is code you don't have to maintain. I enjoy that as well.
Re: What is the most beautiful / highest quality code you've seen (or written)?
#15I really like this code, https://github.com/id-Software/wolf3d but pick any of their repos.
Re: What is the most beautiful / highest quality code you've seen (or written)?
#16The Rust standard library.
Re: What is the most beautiful / highest quality code you've seen (or written)?
#17It's subjective, but I love what some people come up with in the Code Golf Stackexchange (https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/).
Re: What is the most beautiful / highest quality code you've seen (or written)?
#18It wasn't anything special, but one I took a lot of personal enjoyment in was refactoring a god awful mess of untested, poorly written PHP that was at the core of the company's product. It was to the point that no one one the team wanted to touch it in case they'd break something. The CEO had written it and _hated_ any features being added (but always requested them) because it was so fragile.
I refactored it (on Director of Engineering's request) into discrete classes and functions that read well and were easily tested. Tested all our cases and even found existing bugs that were resolved in the move. This wasn't an incredible amount of code to begin with either. The initial file was probably 400-500 lines of code. This was not the feat of an incredible dev, it was just taking a minute to think and build it out. Most of the team could've also done the same in a day.
And then the CEO didn't like the idea of merging it, despite it being fully unit and integration test, along with a staging and canary testing plan.
I've heard they _still_ don't like to touch that file. The company isn't doing well. I don't think those two are correlated, but I do think the general mindset of the leadership does.
Re: What is the most beautiful / highest quality code you've seen (or written)?
#19All the code in the book PAIP by Peter Norvig.