Rought draft of the beginning of a new essay

misc/lydia_book.md

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+### What I wish I would have known about testing when I started...
+
+When I first got involved in free and open source software, I had no clue what
+tests were or why they were important. I had worked on some personal
+programming projects before, but the first time I was actually working on a
+project with others, i.e. got a commit bit, was Yacas, a computer algebra
+system similar to Mathematica.
+
+At this stage in my journey, tests were an afterthought. My general
+meta-algorithm was to hack on code -> "see if it works" -> write a simple test
+to show it works (optional).  If a test was challenging to write, it most
+likely never got written.
+
+This is the first step in the path to Test Driven Enlightment.
+
+If I could open up a wormhole and tell my younger self one peice of wisdom
+about testing, it would be:
+
+    Tests are the proof that your code *actually* works, and they guide you to writing correct
+    code as well as providing the flexibility to change code and know that features still work.
+
+    Some tests, in the long-run, are more important than the code they test.
+
+A few people right about now may be thinking that I put on my tinfoil testing
+hat when I sit down to code. How can tests be *more* important than the code
+they test?
+
+Code either changes and evolves or bitrots. (Footnote: The term "bitrot" is
+coder slang for the almost universal fact that if a piece of code doesn't
+change but everything it relies on *does*, it "rots" and usually has very
+little chance of working without modifications being made to accomodate newer
+software and hardware.)
+
+Very often, you will write tests once, but then totally refactor your
+implementation or even rewrite it from scratch. Tests often outlive the code
+they originally tested, i.e.  once set of tests can be used no matter how many
+times your code is refactored. They are actually the litmus test that allows
+you to throw away an old implementation and say "this newer implementation has
+a much better design and passes our test suite." I have seen this happen many
+times in the Perl and Parrot communities, where you can often find me.
+
+Tests allow you to change things quickly and know if something is broken. They
+are like jetpacks for devevlopers.
+