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The Grug Brained Developer (2022)

(grugbrain.dev)
1087 points smartmic | 1 comments | 17 Jun 25 20:24 UTC | HN request time: 0.222s | 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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novia ◴[18 Jun 25 00:14 UTC] No.44305388[source]▶
Well, what's your workflow? Is there a particular debugger that you love?
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1. titanomachy ◴[18 Jun 25 00:33 UTC] No.44305503[source]▶
I’ve learned not to go against the grain with tools, at least at big companies. Probably some dev productivity team has already done all the annoying work needed to make the company’s codebase work with some debugger and IDE, so I use that: currently, it’s VS Code and LLDB, which is fine. IntelliJ and jdb at my last job was probably better overall.

My workflow is usually:

1. insert a breakpoint on some code that I’m trying to understand

2. attach the debugger and run any tests that I expect to exercise that code

3. walk up and down the call stack, stepping occasionally, reading the code and inspecting the local variables at each level to understand how the hell this thing works and why it’s gone horribly wrong this time.

4. use my new understanding to set new, more relevant breakpoints; repeat 2-4.

Sometimes I fiddle with local variables to force different states and see what happens, but I consider this advanced usage, and anyway it often doesn’t work too well on my current codebase.