As day-to-day developers we all struggle with bugs, maintaining and moving around each other’s code. Piling up layers of it makes our code bases grow out of control to the point where bloated code obscures the understanding of our own solutions.

Losing trust in the tools we use is the first step to writing legacy code, and dealing with codebases like these is one of the primary sources of stress and discomfort in our jobs.

So what makes code comfortable? What makes a codebase habitable? Why do we strive to write simple solutions and what are the obstacles behind them? We’ll go over this questions while looking at code samples from various less-popular-yet-powerful tools in Ruby-land , trying to spot the “less-code” in them.

I’ll also share some of my experience in how this less code type of thinking helped me to get back to the basics and spot my own ignorance, to become a better programmer.