Online web dev tutorials are taking a dangerous turn. Medium articles galore, stackoverflow aplenty...but none of them teach the most important developer skill that is worth its weight in gold. No, it's not "React" or "Svelte" or "Tailwind" buzzword soup.
It's testing and debugging. Unsexy, ugly, schlep inducing work that customers and clients don't see, other devs don't care about, management doesn't know about, your fiance doesn't GAS about.
A developer spends at the very least 30% of their time debugging. And many hours have been spent on hair pulling with simple bugs that could have been caught with good tests. Don't get me wrong, tests are not a magic pill for bugfree code. Coding is still very much an artistic discipline. Testing keeps us in line, away from the rabbit holes.
"Building a chat app in two hours" type of tutorials are great and probably well intentioned, but they leave out the other 40+ hours of real work. Especially if the person building the "chat app" is a senior dev who isn't really thinking about a junior developers mental model of how to build a system - and how it's radically different from theirs.
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