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The Grug Brained Developer (2022)

(grugbrain.dev)
1087 points smartmic | 5 comments | 17 Jun 25 20:24 UTC | HN request time: 0.753s | source
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titanomachy ◴[17 Jun 25 23:45 UTC] No.44305194[source]▶
“Good debugger worth weight in shiny rocks, in fact also more”

I’ve spent time at small startups and on “elite” big tech teams, and I’m usually the only one on my team using a debugger. Almost everyone in the real world (at least in web tech) seems to do print statement debugging. I have tried and failed to get others interested in using my workflow.

I generally agree that it’s the best way to start understanding a system. Breaking on an interesting line of code during a test run and studying the call stack that got me there is infinitely easier than trying to run the code forwards in my head.

Young grugs: learning this skill is a minor superpower. Take the time to get it working on your codebase, if you can.

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1. avhception ◴[18 Jun 25 00:07 UTC] No.44305342[source]▶
Using a debugger on my own code is easy and I love it. The second the debugger steps deep into one of the libs or frameworks I'm using, I'm lost and I hate it. That framework / lib easily has many ten thousands of person-hours under it's belly, and I'm way out of my league.
replies(3): >>44305782 #>>44306161 #>>44309421 #
2. ronjakoi ◴[18 Jun 25 01:23 UTC] No.44305782[source]▶
But you can just use the "step out" feature to get back out when you realise you've gone into a library function. Or "step over" when you can see you're about to go into one.
replies(1): >>44309940 #
3. never_inline ◴[18 Jun 25 02:34 UTC] No.44306161[source]▶
IDEs tend to have a "just my code" option.
4. msluyter ◴[18 Jun 25 12:46 UTC] No.44309421[source]▶
"Step out" is how to get out of the lower level frameworks, and or "step over" to avoid diving into them in the first place. I can't speak for other IDEs, but all of the JetBrains products have these.
5. avhception ◴[18 Jun 25 13:57 UTC] No.44309940[source]▶
While that's true, it doesn't necessarily help me understand why my parameters for said lib or whatever lead to things blowing up.