Not groking TDD, I literally worked my way thru the book, doing each and every step, just to get the gist of the experience.

TDD works fucking great. If you know what you're doing.

Alas, that's a big IF. Most of the stuff I do, I'm just figuring shit out.

Mostly, like when designing a new library, I work outside-in. I imagine how I'd want to do something, writing the client pseudocodeish stuff first, and then trying to make the implementation support my idealized programming mental model.

I end up throwing away A LOT of code. Getting something short and sweet takes a lot of experimentation, most of which are duds.

Though my personal approach of outside-in is trivially like TDD, it's not nearly as rigorous. Were I to be as thorough as TDD, I'd be spending all my time writing tests. Which seems pointless, for code I'm like just going to throw away.

Anyway. Much respect for the guy who wrote that first TDD book. It's one of the few methodological strategies that works as advertised.