Like many developers, when I was first introduced to Test-Driven Development (TDD) I didn’t understand it at all. I didn’t have a clue (nor the patience) on how to go about writing tests first. So, I didn’t put much effort into it and went about my normal flow of writing code before adding tests to cover it. This continued for a number of years.

I co-founded typless back in 2017 where I currently lead the engineering efforts. We had to move quickly in the beginning so we raked up quite a bit of tech debt. At the time, the platform itself was backed by a large, monolithic Django app. Debugging was very difficult. The code was hard to read and even harder to change. We’d squash one bug and three more would replace it. With that, it was time for me to give TDD another shot. Everything I had read about it indicated that it would help – and it did. I finally saw one of the core side-effects from TDD: It makes code changes much easier.

#improving code