The other day I calculated my net contribution to the IMVU client, in lines of code. Excluding third-party libraries, I have subtracted about 100,000 lines since 2005.
Reminds me of an old presentation by Alan Kay. He was demoing some networked virtual world he'd written, including avatars, portals, and chat. He wrote it in Smalltalk, and said it summed to 60,000 lines. He said with a bit more effort, he could probably reduce it to 20,000.
There's something to be said for a complete lack of duplication in the system.
Alan Kay's current project is to implement a full operating system from bare metal to userland GUI in 20,000 LoC, using as many meta-languages as necessary to get there in a pedagogically cogent way: http://vpri.org/html/work/ifnct.htm
Given IMVU's development practices I think your problem is more like "Delete all those people who click on photos of big-chested anime girls in sapphic embraces." (Edited to add: I assume they go on to convert as well. sigh)
Heads up to every person who wants to run an ad-based startup: remnant inventory is the term for the inventory -- i.e. page views -- you have to sell after you sell those spots which are actually worth money. Remnant inventory is nearly worthless. The only people who will pay money for it are either a) idiots who will shortly exit the business or b) people appealing to the lowest common denominator.
If you don't want your website to be cluttered up with Punch My Scantily Clad Diploma Now, My Lord, then you should charge money for it.
That's interesting because Andy, on the first episode of "Nerd TV" said Bill was big on trying to get developers brag about how little time/code/etc, and implied it was so he could try and get them to commit to smaller budgets
Look, this saying is by Bill Gates, should have been made in the last 30 years, it returns three pages of results, and yet none of them are mentioning a source. Some are referencing each other, and some are also including the '640k should be enough for anyone' legend. Yes, it's not 100%, but the indications are not good. The ultimate counterargument of course would be a source.
Always remember that you are a problem solver first and a coder second. Sometimes you can solve a customer's problem without writing a single line of code.
Just by including jQuery in a project I was able to shave a total of 22kb off a range of files without much trouble. But the current release version, minified jQuery is about 23kb. It's a balancing act.
EDIT: Also, in the next version of jQuery, they plan to separate out the core code such that you can include only what you need, so that 23kb will drop to only what you need.
For me at least, the main benefit by far of fewer lines of code is fewer bugs and maintainability. Code kilobytes rarely matter (though I concede "k" can be relevant on the web).
It was an easy way for me to illustrate how many lines of code I culled. I make it sound amazing, but the majority of changes involved turning 20 line functions with for loops into a simple 2 line jQuery snippet.
I remember a story (don't know from where) in which someone was hired to reduce the size of a code base. His compensation went up for each line of code deleted and went down (by a bigger amount) for each time he caused a crash.
That's true, when you use the metric to influence some material gain or loss for the developer. As an indicator for the state of a project (and its speed) together with other metrics, it may not be too bad.
I'm reminded of this Google Tech Talk, where the speaker (Jon Bentley) refers to a colleague's praise of someone who "adds function by deleting code": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMnn0Jq0J-E
For added value combine with sloccount when removing code (I removed $200k value from our software, fixed 8 bugs, and removed that stupid limitation about green text today)...
can anyone help me find a favorite of mine? Its the one where they are building a program and the employee working on it had been let go from apple, but he snuck in every day to finish it.
Reminds me of an old presentation by Alan Kay. He was demoing some networked virtual world he'd written, including avatars, portals, and chat. He wrote it in Smalltalk, and said it summed to 60,000 lines. He said with a bit more effort, he could probably reduce it to 20,000.
There's something to be said for a complete lack of duplication in the system.