It always feels good when your own perspective is validated by someone you respect. Listening to the Immutable podcast episode 36 today, Sam Soffes gave a great endorsement of test driven development that I agree with. Essentially the question was asking for Sam’s perspective on unit testing, specifically challenging whether they are worth the time or not. To summarize Sam’s response, he acknowledged that they might feel like a chore when you are first writing them, but it’s when you are going back to change the code later that the value really shines. This to me is one of the main reasons why I write unit tests. There have been many times when I’ve gone into an existing code base to make a change – either a bug fix or a feature enhancement, only to introduce another bug. It’s when you have an automated test catch this mistake that you’ll buy into the value as well.
Immutable Podcast
I also wanted to recognize this podcast as one that I’ve been enjoying lately. I think you’d like it too. Each episode focuses on five listener submitted questions to Sam Soffes, an iOS engineer, and Bryn Jackson, a designer. Bryan and Sam answer each question with a brief conversation, and the whole episode is 30 minutes or less.
Who is Sam Soffes
Sam Soffes first came onto my radar a couple years ago when I heard that he built and sold a todo app called Cheddar. Later on, I found some good use of his open source framework called SSKeychain. SSKeychain simplifies the storage and retrieval of data in the iOS keychain. It’s very popular on GitHub with over 3000 stars at the time of this writing.
A Role Model For Me
Sam is someone I recognize as a really good engineer in the industry, someone I aspire to be like. I feels really good when you have a role model reinforce one of your values. Take a listen to Sam Soffes on test driven development on Immutable, and let me know what you think.
Happy cleaning.
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