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The Grug Brained Developer (2022)

(grugbrain.dev)
1087 points smartmic | 16 comments | 17 Jun 25 20:24 UTC | HN request time: 1.391s | source | bottom
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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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roncesvalles ◴[18 Jun 25 00:12 UTC] No.44305375[source]▶
I'd love to use a real debugger but as someone who has only ever worked at large companies, this was just never an option. In a microservices mesh architecture, you can't really run anything locally at all, and the test environment is often not configured to allow hooking up a stepping debugger. Print debugging is all you have. If there's a problem with the logging system itself or something that crashes the program before the logs can flush, then not even that.
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1. idontwantthis ◴[18 Jun 25 01:18 UTC] No.44305754[source]▶
At my company our system is composed of 2 dozen different services and all of them can run locally in minikube and easily be debugged in jetbrains.
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2. phito ◴[18 Jun 25 06:52 UTC] No.44307287[source]▶
Yes, it's perfectly doable even if you're doing microservices. Not being able to debug your application is an engineering failure.
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3. roncesvalles ◴[18 Jun 25 07:05 UTC] No.44307354[source]▶
Where do configs and secrets come from? Also, big company = hundreds of microservices.
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4. thunspa ◴[18 Jun 25 10:53 UTC] No.44308706[source]▶
can you say more? how do you do it?
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5. ninkendo ◴[18 Jun 25 12:14 UTC] No.44309201[source]▶
I certainly know how to debug each of the services in my environment, but how do you step-through debug a single request across services? Like, if service A make a gRPC call to service B, are you saying you can “step into” the call from A and your debugger is able to break on the corresponding call in B? And frames from the call in A are there in a logical “stack” from the breakpoint in B?

(Honest question… if such a workflow is possible I’d love to hear about it. Debugging just a single service at a time in isolation is boring and obvious, but if there’s something I’m missing I’d be really curious.)

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6. ninkendo ◴[18 Jun 25 12:26 UTC] No.44309276[source]▶
In my experience you just slap minikube or k3s on your dev machine, and treat it as any other environment. Argo, helm, kustomize, whatever can all work against a local single-node cluster just fine. It takes some effort to make sure your configs are overridable per-environment, but it’s worth doing. (And something you’re hopefully doing anyway if you’re doing any kind of integration/test environment.)

It also requires that each of your services can scale down as well as they can scale up… none of them should be so huge that your whole cluster can’t fit on a single machine, if you’re just simulating one “request” at a time. (Single instances of everything, don’t reserve memory, etc.) There’s use cases where this isn’t practical, but in most cases it’s very doable.

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7. phito ◴[18 Jun 25 14:41 UTC] No.44310324{3}[source]▶
We mostly have dotnet services in k8s, using Rider (IDE) and Telepresence for remote debugging. Having observability (OpenTelemetry) is also really useful.
8. 9rx ◴[18 Jun 25 14:59 UTC] No.44310501[source]▶
A multi-process application isn't the same as microservices. Microservices is a team organization technique, seeing individual teams operate in isolation, as if they were individual businesses. You can't debug other team's services any more than you can debug what happens when you make a call to OpenAI. That is the level of separation you are up against in a microservices context. If you can, you're on the same team, and thus don't have microservices, just a single service.
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9. idontwantthis ◴[18 Jun 25 15:11 UTC] No.44310600[source]▶
No I can’t debug multiple services at once, unfortunately. But I will switch between them as I track the request over multiple runs. Also extensive logging in available in grafana helps me know which service is having the issue before I start debugging.
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10. idontwantthis ◴[18 Jun 25 15:12 UTC] No.44310604{3}[source]▶
Yes all of this.
11. idontwantthis ◴[18 Jun 25 15:12 UTC] No.44310610{3}[source]▶
See ninkendo’s comment. They are doing it with the same tools we are.
12. steve_adams_86 ◴[18 Jun 25 17:15 UTC] No.44311641{3}[source]▶
This is usually enough for me, too. Use tracing, figure out where things fell apart in the traces, isolate those service(s), and debug from there. It's definitely more work. When we start new projects, I encourage people not to use services until proven necessary because this added layer of friction is a real drag. For a lot of us that isn't a choice, though.
13. phito ◴[19 Jun 25 10:26 UTC] No.44317198{3}[source]▶
What? We have dozens of microservices owned by multiple teams, but nothing stops you from cloning the git repository of another team's microservice and debug it the same way you would debug your own.
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14. ◴[19 Jun 25 12:22 UTC] No.44317970{4}[source]▶
15. 9rx ◴[19 Jun 25 12:31 UTC] No.44318032{4}[source]▶
Service is provided by people. You, for example, discover a problem with OpenAI's system that you integrate with and the only way you can address it is to employ the services of the people who work for OpenAI. While that is an example of a macroservice (or what we usually just call a service), it playing out in the macro economy, microservice is the same concept except applied in the micro scale.

But you checking out the code and debugging it means that you are providing the service. Where, exactly, do you find the service (micro or otherwise) boundary in this case?

Or are you just struggling to say that your service utilizes multiple applications?

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16. phito ◴[21 Jun 25 06:14 UTC] No.44335005{5}[source]▶
Sorry but I fail to see how your comments are relevant in this discussion.