I'm surprised the author's takeaway from the Joyce quote was disillusionment. He's actually quite close to the secret sauce. I don't think writing more code and ending up with less code are at odds. In fact, I think you need to write more code to end up with less. You write more code in order to understand the problem space. Once you understand the problem space, you can then refactor everything that you wrote into more concise code that more accurately reflects the problem.
James Joyce wrote Ulysses at the rate of a hundred words per day if you only consider the finished product. However, I doubt every word that Joyce wrote ended up in Ulysses. I'm sure he did quite a lot of cutting and rewriting.
The takeaway from me from the two quoted stories was that quality and quantity are not at odds, but instead are the yin and yang of productivity. They reinforce each other. The more things you produce, the more patterns you are exposed to which in turn leads to higher quality since experience leads to efficiency, giving you more time to get things right.
James Joyce wrote Ulysses at the rate of a hundred words per day if you only consider the finished product. However, I doubt every word that Joyce wrote ended up in Ulysses. I'm sure he did quite a lot of cutting and rewriting.
The takeaway from me from the two quoted stories was that quality and quantity are not at odds, but instead are the yin and yang of productivity. They reinforce each other. The more things you produce, the more patterns you are exposed to which in turn leads to higher quality since experience leads to efficiency, giving you more time to get things right.