"Useless Religion"
Welcome to the new folks that subscribed thanks to the Dead Code 50th episode giveaway! To those of you that don't know what I'm talking about, you should check out the fiftieth episode of Dead Code. It could earn you a hat.
The other week I put out a quick blog post commenting on the responses to a Reddit post about TDD that was posted to r/rails.
Do you guys really do TDD? | Jared Norman
I got nerd-sniped by a Reddit post on Test-Driven Development. Sorry in advance.
So here's a bonus one. This one person insisted (across multiple comments, actually) that TDD is a "useless religion".
TDD is the most useless religion in software engineering. Unit testing, sure, high coverage, sure, but TDD... whatever floats whoever's boat, but don't push it on me.
I've seen people talk about the practice like that before, and it always makes me wonder: do these people think that those of that find value in the practice are lying? If you don't find it useful, don't use it. But "useless"? Surely all the people who find value in the practice are proof against that. Anyway, enough getting sniped by throwaway Reddit comments.
As mentioned above, the fiftieth episode of Dead Code is out and I'm now looking ahead. If anyone out there has good ideas about who I should have on next, just reply to this email. Spoilers: next week we've got an interview with Justin Searls about many things, including the path to mastery in software development. I'm really excited for everyone to hear that one.
Finally, sorry I've been a little slow at releasing more of the "building with Ruby, but not Rails" posts I promised. The team ended up tackling a bunch of the real work on the app and I haven't had time to extract the tutorials from the actual code. It's coming.
For this week's musical recommendation, it has to be the new Deftones album, private music. I didn't listen to Deftones in the late 90s and early 00s, instead getting into their music during the COVID pandemic. The new record shows that despite some lineup changes, they've still got it. I just wish I'd managed to get tickets for their recent show in Vancouver.
