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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: 0.503s | 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. bloomca ◴[18 Jun 25 00:40 UTC] No.44305552[source]▶
Personally, I think that debugger is very helpful in understanding what is going on, but once you are familiar with the code and data structures, I am very often pretty close in my assessment, so scanning code and inserting multiple print lines is both faster and more productive.

I only used debugger recently in C# and C, when I was learning and practicing them.

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2. oh_my_goodness ◴[18 Jun 25 00:42 UTC] No.44305560[source]▶
A lot of people think that. That's why it's important to read the essay.