Clever code is probably the worst code you could write

Engineer’s Codex is a free publication about real-world software engineering. I write about real-world technical case studies, outages, and interesting stories from the industry. When I was an undergrad, Leetcode broke my brain. I would see top solutions of esoteric one-liners and wrongly think “how do I ever get this good?” This is commonly called “code golfing”. It’s a fun hobby, but very far from “good code.” Everybody (including those on Leetcode) knows this isn’t good code. In the industry, it’s the worst code one could write. However, on the other end of the spectrum, I realized eventually that the clearest code was actually the hardest to write. It made sense retrospectively. Reviewing the code of a senior staff software engineer was much easier to follow and review compared to the code of an entry-level L3 engineer. The “power” of clear code, for better or for worse, was made fully clear to me after a certain incident at work. I once wrote a data enrichment module in C++, a lan

Engineer’s Codex is a free publication about real-world software engineering. I write about real-world technical case studies, outages, and interesting stories from the industry. When I was an undergrad, Leetcode broke my brain. I would see top solutions of esoteric one-liners and wrongly think “how do I ever get this good?” This is commonly called “code golfing”. It’s a fun hobby, but very far from “good code.” Everybody (including those on Leetcode) knows this isn’t good code. In the industry, it’s the worst code one could write. However, on the other end of the spectrum, I realized eventual