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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: 0.433s | 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. octo888 ◴[18 Jun 25 04:28 UTC] No.44306654[source]▶
My hypothesis is that because we generally don't/can't use debuggers in production but rather rely on logging and tracing, that extends to local dev.
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2. Nezteb ◴[18 Jun 25 14:35 UTC] No.44310279[source]▶
Agreed!

If you usually aren't able/allowed to use a debugger in production and must rely on observability tools, it's helpful to know how to utilize those tools locally as effectively as possible when debugging.