As some of you know, I recently started an apprenticeship as a Ruby on Rails software engineer. I came into this new job with very little experience in the backend, let alone Ruby, and absolutely no experience with testing. My manager has been incredible with providing me with opportunities and resources to learn (I’m now on a full time team at the company!)

One of the things that she was very adamant about was that we needed to be testing. Not only were we learning how to code an app in Ruby on Rails, but we also needed to be able to write tests for our code. When I first started out, I found that writing tests seemed even harder than actually building the app we were working on. I’d knock out the actual app code in a day or two, but then it’d take almost a week to figure out how to write the right test to make sure that code was right. At the time, it was a little frustrating and I often questioned what the point was. But now that I’m working in a larger company application, one with a codebase that’s touched every day by many other developers, I’ve gained a real appreciation for writing tests.

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