Found in 2 comments on Hacker News
myoffe · 2013-09-26
· Original
thread
Nope, there's no way around it. Tests are not easy. But! Writing tests, learning from that, then improving your tests, which in turn help you design better software will make writing tests easier. And will help you write better code, in general.
Also, 99% of the time, the first test you are going to write in a job is for an existing piece of software. So it will definitely not be easy. But you will learn so much more about the software you are writing the test against rather than writing code in the edit-and-pray methodology.
I highly recommend reading http://www.amazon.com/Growing-Object-Oriented-Software-Guide...
And I wish I could contribute, but I'm so jaded and scarred by Javascript at this point it's not even funny. (For context, I spent a lot of time debugging JS on Internet Exploiter in the early 2000's long before anything cool and JS-related existed, and I do Ruby now.)
Can you do me a huge favor, though (and I'd be happy to toss you an entire bitcoin if you simply promise to do this): You NEED a better test suite. You're writing software that deals with money (or "a money," whatever), it absolutely needs a robust test suite. Primarily unit tests, but also a few functional tests. For both the server-side AND client-side code. Bitcoin itself has a reasonably good test suite, yours should too. I REALLY doubt Blockchain.info has a good one. You could distinguish yourself this way while also covering your own ass in the event you need to refactor things without breaking things :)
I didn't think tests were fun to write until I realized how much time they were saving me in debugging and headaches after the fact. Do it now, before your code size gets much bigger.
I highly recommend this book http://www.amazon.com/Growing-Object-Oriented-Software-Guide...
Again, happy to order it for you (it's not cheap) or just toss in some more BTC if you promise to order it and read it.
I don't know what cred I can give you other than to tell you I'm "GSpotAssassin", a well-known big tipper on /r/bitcoin. (I got into bitcoin very early, and I'm an open-source developer.)
Anyway, congrats on your self-funded expedition, that is pretty fucking rad and I expect big things. :)