Rethinking Code Reuse: My Talk at Noser Engineering E-Days

Earlier this month, from September 4th to 6th, I had the pleasure of participating in Noser Engineering's annual E-Days. This internal event is a fantastic opportunity for everyone in the company to share knowledge through talks, hackathons, and focus groups. It’s also a great way to connect with colleagues and have some fun.

Some sessions are streamed publicly, and I was excited to give a talk on a topic I'm passionate about: "code reuse" and, more importantly, when we should actually do it.

The Problem with "Code Reuse"

In modern software development, the term "code reuse" often carries a negative connotation. I believe this stems from 20+ years of evangelically following the DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) principle. Many developers have worked in complex, over-engineered codebases where premature abstraction created more problems than it solved. As a result, there's a tendency to be conservative and avoid introducing reusable code.

While that caution is often the right call, it's not the whole story. There are many clear cases where generalizing a piece of functionality is the correct decision, allowing it to scale and be used in more than one place.

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Watch the Talk

If this sounds interesting to you, I invite you to check out the full recording of my talk. We explore the nuances of when to be conservative and when to embrace generalization.

The talk is in german, but it supports subtitles with english translations.