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Biggest aha moment

Bertil Muth on June 19, 2018

A moment when you thought: “Wow, I finally get this! How cool!”

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Ben Halpern

I recall the first time TDD really worked naturally for me, I was like OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

I'd read a lot about the practice, but it took quite a while before I was good enough where I wasn't stumbling around in the dark. TDD isn't as effective when you have no idea what you're doing.

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kip

How much time did you need to work naturally with TDD ? Any advice for newbies ?

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Patrick Waivers

"Uncle" Bob Martin has a great powerpoint on learning TDD: butunclebob.com/ArticleS.UncleBob..... For any new language or test framework, he solves the Bowling Game coding kata. Following his examples helped me understand TDD better.

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Ben Halpern

It took me quite a long time and I still don't TDD all the time to say the least. But I think it depends on your personality/coding style. It took me years, but along the way I learned that TDD was way less common than most people imply, and its use actually pretty rare.

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kip • Edited

Interesting, I'm always see and hear that devs(seniors maybe ?) says "TDD has a lot of benefits, you need to use". Thanks Ben.

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Thomas H Jones II

The joys of automating deployments of stuff that's not really designed for automated deployment constructs is that it seems I have less in the way of straight-up "ah hah!" moments than I seem to have "you gotta be f***ing kidding me!" moments. Even more so when something has (seemingly) arbitrarily changed between upstream product versions and something that's been working for months suddenly doesn't. :p

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Meghan (she/her)

I manually implemented a service that used OAuth 2. I literally jumped for joy. I'd looked at flow diagrams for months and something didn't read right. Then I was working on something that used it, sat down, implemented it, and the first time I logged in and everything worked, it all clicked. Everything made sense.

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Thomas Melville

2 from me.

  1. When I read head first design patterns after reading the gang of four design patterns and being confused :-)
  2. When I adopted a growth mindset.
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Bertil Muth

Head first design patterns? Didn’t even know that. Worth reading?

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rhymes

Loved that book, much clearer than GOF 😜

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Thomas Melville

Definitely. It's all the same patterns but explained in simpler terms and example situations and implementations for each one.
g.co/kgs/51Czps

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Bertil Muth

Mine was when I read the Gang of Four Design Patterns book, years ago. I thought: "Now I finally get object oriented programming!" I was excited. And of course I tried to implement each pattern at least once :-)

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Patrick Waivers

I have the book and I use it for reference. However it is so dense and dry that I have a really difficult time reading it cover-to-cover and understand all of the patterns. It is a really good book though.

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John Alcher

Understanding recursion is a pretty awesome moment for me. Another one is appreciating how "functions are values" play with other concepts in functional programming.