A personal technical retrospective about moving away from framework-first development, reducing client-side JavaScript, using server-rendered HTML, and treating browser APIs as architectural tools rather than outdated limitations.

Deleting code sounds easy until the code belongs to a running product.

A function may have no direct callers but still be loaded through a plugin registry. A serializer may look duplicated but quietly preserve an old field name used by one customer. A command may not appear in analytics because it runs from cron at 3:10 a.m. on the first Sunday of each month. Python makes this even more fun because imports, decorators, entry points, reflection, monkey patches, and strings can all become hidden edges in the dependency graph.

The project in this story was a multi-tenant reporting backend written in Python. It accepted events, stored normalized records, generated reports, exported CSV and JSON files, and delivered them through HTTP, email, and object storage. Nothing huge. Around 140 API endpoints, 46 background tasks, PostgreSQL, Redis, and a queue.

The repository contained 62,914 lines of Python excluding tests and migrations.

That number was not the actual problem. The problem was that a small change in report filtering could require edits in the API schema, a service class, a repository, a filter translator, a query builder, an export adapter, and several nearly identical tests. The system had layers, but the layers did not reduce complexity. They distributed it.

The first plan was a rewrite. Fortunately, that plan died before production did.

Instead, the question became much simpler: How much code can disappear while externally observable behavior remains unchanged?

That wording changed the whole project.

Иногда возникает странное ощущение: железо стало безумно быстрым, процессоры научились выполнять миллиарды операций в секунду, памяти стало больше, чем раньше было дискового пространства. Но почему-то программы всё равно тормозят. Открываешь простой веб-интерфейс — и ноутбук начинает шуметь вентиляторами. Запускаешь приложение для заметок — и оно ест полгигабайта RAM. Я долго думал, откуда это ощущение. Потом начал копаться: читать дизассемблер, смотреть профилировщики, запускать микробенчмарки. И постепенно стало понятно, что дело не в железе. Дело в том, как мы пишем код.

Предлагаю поговорить о кэше процессора, о том, сколько стоит случайный доступ к памяти, о том, как CPU исполняет ваш цикл.