All you folks are crazy not to unit test personal projects. Unit tests don’t need to be fancy and exhaustive. A sanity check and having a simple way to execute isolated code is well worth the 15 minutes of setting it up. Heck, just use them as scratch files to try out libraries and APIs. I can’t imagine having the kind of time to raw-dog that f12 button and sifting through print() nonsense all night.
I think it also very much depends on your tooling & how easy it feels to start writing unit tests.
When I work in a Java project for example I always write unit tests even for personal stuff, because the IDE integration is great and it’s really quick to create a test class, run it and see granular results. I don’t feel the same way about testing JavaScript because the tooling at least for me hasn’t worked quite as well (though that could very well be my own fault, it’s been a while since I looked into it). The more cumbersome setting up and running the tests is, the more tempting it becomes to just use the console or manually test parts instead.
If I ever want to take a break from my personal project and come back to it. Unit tests are necessary. If I try to continue working on a project that doesn’t have unit tests. I feel like every bit of code I touch is introducing countless hours of debugging. It really demoralizes me.
All you folks are crazy not to unit test personal projects. Unit tests don’t need to be fancy and exhaustive. A sanity check and having a simple way to execute isolated code is well worth the 15 minutes of setting it up. Heck, just use them as scratch files to try out libraries and APIs. I can’t imagine having the kind of time to raw-dog that f12 button and sifting through print() nonsense all night.
I think it also very much depends on your tooling & how easy it feels to start writing unit tests.
When I work in a Java project for example I always write unit tests even for personal stuff, because the IDE integration is great and it’s really quick to create a test class, run it and see granular results. I don’t feel the same way about testing JavaScript because the tooling at least for me hasn’t worked quite as well (though that could very well be my own fault, it’s been a while since I looked into it). The more cumbersome setting up and running the tests is, the more tempting it becomes to just use the console or manually test parts instead.
If I ever want to take a break from my personal project and come back to it. Unit tests are necessary. If I try to continue working on a project that doesn’t have unit tests. I feel like every bit of code I touch is introducing countless hours of debugging. It really demoralizes me.