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Hot take 🔥. You should probably stop writing unit tests.
If you’ve been a developer for any amount of time you would have written, or at least heard of unit tests. They’re a way to test that a unit of code that you’ve written is doing what it’s supposed to be doing. There’s a good definition of what they are on Smartbear.com
“A unit test is a way of testing a unit — the smallest piece of code that can be logically isolated in a system.” Smartbear.com
They make sense right? And for the longest time I’ve been okay with unit tests. They can be a pain to write and can break quite easily but for the most part, they’re a good way of quickly giving you, the developer confidence in your code. I thought that until recently when a few things happened at once that made me change my mind about them.
Firstly, I watched an episode of DevHour hosted by a popular code streamer (I don’t know if that’s the official term) called, The Primeagen. Prime interviewed someone called Theo was a developer at Twitch but now has his own company called ping.gg. Anyway, a huge chunk of this conversation was spent on Theo explaining why he didn’t like unit tests. In fact, his codebase for ping.gg does not contain any…
