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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: 0.775s | 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. wagwang ◴[18 Jun 25 01:27 UTC] No.44305806[source]▶
I find that debuggers solve a very specific class of bugs of intense branching complexity in a self contained system. But the moment there's stuff going in and out of DBs, other services, multithreading, integrations, etc, the debugger becomes more of a liability without a really advanced tooling team.
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2. eternityforest ◴[18 Jun 25 07:35 UTC] No.44307496[source]▶
I think of "don't break the debugger" as a top important design heuristic.

It's one point in favor of async, and language that make async debugging easy.

And at the very least, you can encapsulate things so they can be debugged separately from the multi threading stuff.

If you're always using the debugger, you learn to build around it as one of your primary tools for interacting with code, and you notice right away if the debugger can't help with something.