
Why Your Obsession with Code Readability is Overblown (And When to Let Go)
Let me tell you a story about the most expensive semicolon I’ve ever encountered. Last year, my team inherited a legacy payment processing system that handled $14M/day. The previous developers had prioritized “clean code” so aggressively that the system needed 47 microservices to handle what a single well-optimized service could achieve. Their code was pristine. Their architecture looked like a Jackson Pollock painting made by Venn diagrams. The system failed spectacularly during Black Friday....