Why I don't have tests for my blog - a podcast by Kent C. Dodds

What is up my friends so I'm a little bit late today, sorry but it is
January 6, 20 21 and I'm excited to talk about testing so I had a bug on my
website kidsdance.com slash contact where you'd fill out a contact form and
one of the things that happens is server side validation, so that uses aserverless function that I have running on Netlify, it is great, it's
awesome the way that it works but yeah one of what it does is it uses a,NPMmodule called OW to do validation and on my website.
I pretty much just like every week when I write a blog post I just updateall the packages sometimes. I'll take a look at some of the breaking
changes like major version bumps and stuff but often I just like I pull upand ship it because I don't really care and that's actually kind of what I
wanted to talk about is.I I do have some tests on my website. I have one or I,Handful of unit tests
and then a cypress test that just makes sure that you can pull it up andand click on this on a link and stuff so I know that at least it does open
but I didn't have any sort of test for my contact form which is why this
bug slipped out but here's here's the reason why I haven't invested any
time into testing my own site, which is kind of like a lot of people wouldthink that's paradoxical like hold on a second can't see.
Dodds doesn't even test his own website, well the thing is that I think
that it's important that you measure or that you think about.The things
that you have to do all relative to one another and that includes tests sotests is just another task on your list of things to do and you need to
think consider things relative to their return on the investment and for mewriting some tests for my website has a pretty low return on investment
frankly, like if something breaks it's not a huge deal.
I'm not like taking people's money there or storing their you know, secure
information or anything like that, it's not like a big deal of something
breaks and that was the case here somebody sent me an email and said, heyyour contact form is broken and that's why I sent you.
Direct email so yeah maybe I missed a couple of contacts you know peoplesaying trying to contact me but actually I don't really care how much so
yeah so it ended up not being a big deal. I fixed it and I pushed that outand hopefully the context form is working now but I just wanted to talk
about that.I do have a blog post actually about this, you know, whether you should fix
the bug or write a test, you know, just how you prioritize testing and forme, I prioritize it like everything else that I do just consider the return
on investment and focus on the highest return hope that's helpful have a
wonderful day.

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