Well done guys. For good insights on how you could approach some UX challenges in a tool like Plotly, I highly recommend watching Bret Victor's "Drawing Dynamic Visualizations".
For the non-Plotly folks reading this, Bret's presentation is also very effective at blowing your mind in general.
What other things do you do regularly? Write emails, specs, contracts, documentation?
Of course you probably also do other stuff than typing on a keyboard. It's just that the keyboard often is the most efficient interface between you and your main tool, your computer.
I think typing speed is a good competency to improve to be more efficient in the next few decades.
What James is referring to is not necessarily stripping out big pieces of code when they've been working in production for a while.
Rather the point is that in a given coding sprint, he gets the first thing that works going, then starts from there and rewrites them better if need be.
So it's just an approach to developing a given method or class rather than refactoring for the heck of it.
For the non-Plotly folks reading this, Bret's presentation is also very effective at blowing your mind in general.
http://vimeo.com/66085662