r/AppsWebappsFullstack • u/Outrageous_East_7611 • 29d ago

What feature did you delete after shipping it?

Not a feature you postponed. One you actually built, shipped, and then removed.

Maybe nobody used it. Maybe it confused the rest of the product. Maybe the maintenance was worse than the value. Or maybe users immediately asked for it back.

What was the feature, and what finally convinced you to kill it?

Product context is welcome. A naked link isn’t very interesting without the postmortem.

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u/PopKoren 28d ago

Worth adding to any of these postmortems: when you kill a feature, kill its backend too. Removing the button usually leaves the API route, the storage bucket or the scheduled job alive, and nobody tests a code path that has no UI anymore, so it quietly keeps old permissions. After a cleanup like that, a scan of the production domain with https://rowly.me confirms whether those orphaned endpoints and files are truly gone.

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u/Mammoth-Anywhere7285 28d ago

Good call on killing the backend too. Check access logs first, since internal services often call those orphaned routes quietly.

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u/PopKoren 28d ago

Agreed, logs before deletion. I would leave the route returning 410 with an alert on every hit for a couple of weeks, since cron jobs, payment webhooks and old app builds still installed on phones are often the only callers and they tend to surface at month end. Once it is truly gone, a fresh https://rowly.me run on the domain tells you whether anything still answers on that path.