Quit Crying And Build Something

Apr 17, 2012

The latest exchanges about semicolons and testing on Twitter may have done me in. I don’t seem to enjoy the service as much as I once did. I can remember having the chance to meet and chat with people that I otherwise wouldn’t have had the chance to. Now it’s just a hotbed of crying. Everything from “my testing process is better than yours” to “I’m too cool for semi colons in my JavaScrip”. What an complete waste of time, and I suspect there are many like me that just don’t care what everyone else is doing.

As a reminder for those that get caught up in the processes and tools arguments, a quote from the Agile Manifesto (if that’s your thing)

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

More and more, all I care about is working software. How we get there doesn’t matter to me much. As long as I am confident in the code that I write, I’m happy. Sometimes that’s acceptance tests with Cucumber; sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it’s unit tests at the model layer because the HTML and URL are unimportant; sometimes it’s not. It’s really, really simple. Use the best tool for job and don’t worry about what Joe Programmer uses. You are ruining it for everyone else.