> I've never been a fan of TDD and personally I think tests that really hit your DB, Redis, etc. help a lot more than mocked out unit tests or a billion unit tests and nothing else... ...but I do really write to the DB and other data stores in tests

I've come to the conclusion that the idea that "unit tests" should test functions/objects in isolation with completely mocked dependencies is based more on the slow speed of those dependencies in the past than what actually makes for good tests. Now that we have faster computers and storage devices, and easy/fast store creation, we should move past this.

Obviously, this is very dependant (no pun intended) on the dependency in question, but as a minimum, anything with SQL should have a test that hits a real SQL DB (PG in docker for example) at some point.