The Grug Brained Developer (2022)

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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]▶

>>44305194 #

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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idontwantthis ◴[18 Jun 25 01:18 UTC] No.44305754[source]▶

>>44305375 #

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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1. phito ◴[18 Jun 25 06:52 UTC] No.44307287[source]▶

>>44305754 #

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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2. thunspa ◴[18 Jun 25 10:53 UTC] No.44308706[source]▶

>>44307287 (TP) #

can you say more? how do you do it?

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3. phito ◴[18 Jun 25 14:41 UTC] No.44310324[source]▶

>>44308706 #

We mostly have dotnet services in k8s, using Rider (IDE) and Telepresence for remote debugging. Having observability (OpenTelemetry) is also really useful.

4. 9rx ◴[18 Jun 25 14:59 UTC] No.44310501[source]▶

>>44307287 (TP) #

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.

replies(1): >>44317198 #

5. idontwantthis ◴[18 Jun 25 15:12 UTC] No.44310610[source]▶

>>44308706 #

See ninkendo’s comment. They are doing it with the same tools we are.

6. phito ◴[19 Jun 25 10:26 UTC] No.44317198[source]▶

>>44310501 #

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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7. ◴[19 Jun 25 12:22 UTC] No.44317970{3}[source]▶

>>44317198 #

8. 9rx ◴[19 Jun 25 12:31 UTC] No.44318032{3}[source]▶

>>44317198 #

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?