Serguey Asael Shinder – IT Professional

I lost most of a day to a bug once. It was subtle, embarrassing, and lived in a corner of the code I’d have sworn was fine. When I finally found it, the relief was enormous and I nearly closed the ticket and walked away.

Something made me stop and do one more thing: write the test that would have caught it. Not a big suite — one small test that reproduced the exact failure and then passed once the fix was in.

Three months later, refactoring, I changed a line that would have reintroduced that same bug. The test went red instantly. I didn’t lose a day. I lost about eight seconds, and I sat there feeling quietly grateful to the version of me who’d taken those extra few minutes.

That’s when tests stopped being a chore I did for a coverage number and became something I actually understood. A fix stops a bug once. A test stops it forever, especially against the person most likely to break it again — future me, who won’t remember any of this.

Now every real bug earns a test before I close it. My test suite has slowly become a museum of every mistake I promised myself I wouldn’t repeat. It’s the most honest documentation I own.

– Serguey Asael Shinder