Harald Reingruber is embarking on a coding tour... and other things I learned recording his DevJourney

This week, I published Harald Reingruber's #DevJourney story on my eponym Podcast: Software developer's Journey. Among many other things, here are my main personal takeaways:

• Curiosity, is what brought Harald to computers. Understanding how they work, how to use them and bend them to one's will... mostly by breaking them and having to fix them afterwards is how he got hooked.
• Harald was/is very interested in visual programming, but not really for the design of it, more because of the visual feedback.
• Harald described the "test pyramid" i.e. having a lot of unit-tests at the bottom, less integration tests on top of that, and even less manual tests at the very top of the pyramid.
• When Harald left the Healthcare industry and joined a startup in Augmented-Reality. He loved the higher pace and drive for very fast results, but missed the (very) high-quality standards. After a while, he really got the feeling that saving on quality, brought only short term gains.
• That's when he started feeling that TDD and pair-programming could be cornerstones for his future. He learned more about it at CodeRetreats, and finally decided to go on a pair-programming tour in the USA in spring 2020 and hone those skill along the way.
• So far the planned stops on his journey are: San Diego, San Francisco, Portland and Vancouver.
• Stay tunes on his Twitter for more information while he is at it!
• Advice: "it's by talking to people that you can plan adventures like this one"

More quotes:

• "I learned the most from the things that didn't go that well"
• "A huge number of integration tests are not a good idea, but semi-optimal tests are better than no tests"

Thanks Harald for sharing your story with us!

You can find the full episode and the shownotes on devjourney.info

Did you listen to his story?

• What did you learn?
• What are your personal takeaways?
• What did you find particularly interesting?