Personally, for now, I like being one of the "maintainergineers". Often, when I read code written by "green fielders", I question their competence, and questio

Personally, for now, I like being one of the "maintainergineers". Often, when I read code written by "green fielders", I question their competence, and question myself why I'm still working at this place. I admit this says more about my ignorance than anything else. I'm just saying what I feel at the moment. All projects that I have been part of in my current company don't have automated tests (at least initially before I joined). Instead we rely on QA. Since I read a lot about things like DDD / well architected code I often dream working on a codebase where implementing features and fixing bugs isn't frustrating and deploying to production isn't nerve wracking. Since the first step of refactoring is to have tests, in my first project I endeavoured to have unit/integration/e2e tests. They're a bit subpar for my taste, and can be a bit slow to run at times. However, these tests allowed me to sleep better at night after each deployment. In the last few days, since joining a new (EDIT: non-greenfield, as a maintainer) project, all I've done is write unit/integration tests. (EDIT: I'm writing unit tests to what I currently consider very sloppy code, e.g., not using dependency injection, leaky abstractions like calling request() inside a model class (project uses laravel framework)) I like to think that what I have done and what I'm doing right now will enable me to write better architected code. As an extremely simple example, I find it harder to test `new FooClass` than its dependency injected counterpart. I hope I'll remember that next time I write code.