How a Solo Hobbyist Learned to Love Testing

I don’t get paid to write code. I have no boss to answer to. I have no partner to work with. Most of the apps I produce are for me to use. When I was learning Python with online videos, I was introduced to testing. I found it interesting, but it felt time consuming.

Then I went back to an old app I had written and wanted to re-work. I was lost. I couldn’t even figure out where to begin to make it work again. I slowly decided to integrate testing into my personal workflow on projects. Then I came upon an unexpected benefit: by testing my code in a Django app, I was able to better learn what the library was doing to convert a request into a response. I knew the steps, but through writing a test with an expected output and seeing the error messages on failures, I now intuitively understand how this process works. This talk will demonstrate that.