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The Grug Brained Developer (2022)

(grugbrain.dev)
1087 points smartmic | 2 comments | 17 Jun 25 20:24 UTC | HN request time: 0.422s | 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. nyarlathotep_ ◴[18 Jun 25 00:37 UTC] No.44305534[source]▶
> 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.

One of the first things I do in a codebase is get some working IDE/editor up where I can quickly run the program under a debugger, even if I'm not immediately troubleshooting something. It's never long before I need to use it.

I was baffled when I too encountered this. Even working collaboratively with people they'd have no concept of how to use a debugger.

"No, set a breakpoint there"

"yeah now step into the function and inspect the state of those variables"

"step over that"

: blank stares at each instance :

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2. joshvm ◴[18 Jun 25 19:26 UTC] No.44312640[source]▶
For desktop GUI development I can't imagine not using breakpoints and stepping. Especially when you have several ways that some callback might be triggered. It's super helpful to break on a UI element signal (or slot) and then follow along to see why things aren't working.

I don't use debuggers as often in Python, probably because it's eaiser to throw code in a notebook and run line by line to inspect variables, change/inject state and re-run. That's possible but a lot harder to do in C++.

Also for embedded work, using a debugger and memory viewer is pretty powerful. It's not something people think about for Arduino but almost every commodity micro supports some sort of debugwire-like interface (which is usually simpler than JTAG).