Words: You Aren't Gonna Need It (YAGNI)
Another daily muse. It’s not surprising that our technical team continues to discover unused functions within a particular feature library. Although the names of these functions may sound promising, the logic inside is often outdated, as they haven’t been refactored to align with the current context of the feature. Some of these functions were written ages ago. This is where I need to borrow a concept from my university days, when my mates and I often applied Extreme Programming (XP) principles in our software projects. The core idea: Don’t add functionality until it’s actually needed. This is essentially the You Aren't Gonna Need It (YAGNI) philosophy. To quote Ron Jeffries, a co-founder of XP, as taken from Wikipedia: "Always implement things when you actually need them, never when you just foresee that you [will] need them."