watching fun fun function today I want
to do a YouTube cover of a Korra answer
that I wrote some time ago and it’s
titled do you write unit tests for
personal projects and the answer is yes
right
your goddamn unit tests always to be
perfectly honest I am actually a little
more disciplined with writing unit tests
for my personal projects because you
know they are my babies
and also because I often have the luxury
of being the only one working on them so
I I get to structure the applications
for testability from the start I write
tests because I firmly believe that code
without tests is buggy and bad code if
I’m not writing tests I believe that I
am doing a bad job over the years I have
become more and more convinced that unit
testing and holds the same value as
things like for example version control
it’s it’s one of those things that is
just stupid not to do if you’re writing
a teeny-tiny script with only one
execution paths and it will only live
for a couple of weeks then yeah unit
tests are overkill but beyond that I
have found that it almost always saves
you time if you intend to actually spend
a couple of weeks on something or longer
then unit tests will pay off that
assumes that you are a kind of
experienced unit tester the first time
you do unit testing it’s gonna be very
slow because you know you’re bad at unit
testing you have no idea how many things
break and break in your code until you
start writing unit tests for them it’s
just ludicrous I am currently looking at
a relatively small piece of code that
I’ve written for Spotify so I can’t
unfortunately not show it to you but it
is slightly about 250 lines of code and
it has 137 test cases let me repeat that
250 lines of logic
ended up being 157 test cases and this
is not me being crazy or anything adding
a lot of unnecessary test cases I don’t
test every possible variable or anything
like that if you’re only doing manual
testing on your side project you’re
probably checking 3 or 4 cases every
time you you commit maybe if you really
disciplined a lot more discipline than I
am you’re doing 10 even if you really
disciplined you are simply not gonna
test everything using just manual
testing it’s not realistic the way I see
it when you’re writing code in an
existing code base you’re going to break
a lot of things that used to work before
your change and a lot of those errors
are going to be subtle and if all you
have is a manual test suite and you
don’t have an automated test suite
checking all those for you you are
probably gonna miss them I know that
unit testing often feels frustrating
when you are developing a new project
because it feels like they’re slowing
you down and it doesn’t feel like the
code is all that complex anyway but you
have to remember that after only a few
weeks of development your time will have
shifted you are now not spending most of
your time writing new code you are
spending most of your time making
changes in existing code and making
changes in existing code can be done
many times faster like 10 times faster
if you have a good unit test suite for
that piece of code and that is why unit
tests save so much time even on pretty
small personal projects I am MP J and
this was an episode of fun fun function
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them until next Monday morning stay curious