I have recently read an interesting discussion online. It was a talk among developers where they shared their common love for writing the code. The ultimate pleasure of seeing your thoughts materialize, perform their job and vanish.
But there is one part of my daily routine that I like even more. And that is deleting code. It is great sensation when you are working on a bug inside a convoluted piece of code and suddenly realize that you can just delete the whole thing.
There once was a bug in HTML encoding routine, but all it ever would get as an input was already base64-encoded.
There once was a complex set of Spring filters and configurers that made Spring Security work as intended, which was all replaced by writing one small controller with just two methods.
There was an AOP advise applied to everything, but doing nothing useful (anymore).
Most of the time I am fixing a bug, I delete more code than I write instead.
And that feels great. When the code you wrote not only delivers the expected result, but it is also pleasant to look at.
I like things to be elegant.