Why do I get better at things when I ignore them for a while?

Calculus, coding, cooking, gaming...it doesn't seem to matter.

There’s something to be said for looking at one’s own code again after a multi-month hiatus from doing any programming.

I opened up the Visual Studio solution of one of the apps I maintain for work the other day and almost immediately spotted a way to improve its performance and trim its memory usage. 

A lot of it has to do with how it handles the input files that feed it data to process, and the specific bits of code I've excised were actually added – or left behind by – the developer who helped me set up the framework of the app back in 2010 when I was still learning C#. 

I’m surprised I hadn't noticed them the last time I tried to tune the app’s performance. Apparently, all I needed to do was not code anything. At all. For six months or so. (This is also how I improved my calculus mark in university; don't ask.)

I haven’t done any benchmarking yet to see just what sort of actual improvements I’ve achieved, but a few test runs of the new build of the app felt promising. This isn’t really proof…but I’ve been maintaining this app for 12 years now, so I’m quite intimately familiar with how it runs.