The Life-Changing Magic of Tidy Code — Applying KonMari method to code

Colin Wren
9 min readJan 11, 2020
Photo by Panos Sakalakis on Unsplash

After watching a couple of episodes of Marie Kondo’s show on Netflix I picked up her book ‘The Life-Changing Manga of Tidying Up’ as I’ve always been into organisational techniques and the work she did with the people on that show really struck a chord with me.

As someone who works at a consultancy my day-to-day job is dealing with legacy code and tidying it up for the client so it’s easier to work with and is more maintainable in the future.

The KonMari method takes things a step further by bringing sentiment into the process and I think that’s something that’s easy to overlook when refactoring code.

Now I’m not suggesting that developers say ‘thank you’ to every line they delete as refactor code but I think there’s something we can learn from taking the time to understand the value the code delivered instead of just saying ‘which fucktard wrote this!’.

The KonMari Method

Marie Kondo’s manga tells a story of a young professional who is tired of coming home to a messy flat, guys she brings back to her flat calling her messy and how through the KonMari method she is able to realise her dream home through de-cluttering and organisation.

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Colin Wren
Colin Wren

Written by Colin Wren

Currently building reciprocal.dev. Interested in building shared understanding, Automated Testing, Dev practises, Metal, Chiptune. All views my own.