Programming: When Should I Care About Testing, Architecture, and Legibility?
Published in
9 min readSep 18, 2020
My name is Ryan, and I hate jargon. I hate jargon because I am ill-equipped to remember it, but the reason why I still write decent code is that I am well equipped to understand the concepts which these jargon words point to.
In this article, I will talk about three things that go together (testing, architecture, and legibility), and when you should start to care about them. While this is partly a subjective question, there actually exists a fairly concrete answer to this question and I need not use big scary words to explain it.
This article covers:
- Why some people do not bother with tests, architecture, and writing legible code, and when this is a reasonable thing to do
- How the scale and complexity of your program can give you a clear intuition on when you should care about that stuff
- What the actual benefit of applying this stuff is in clear terms and examples
- A quick series of questions you can ask yourself to make the decision easier
Why Do Some People Say No?
If you have had the misfortune of trying to learn about software architecture or testing your code, then you have probably been met with:
