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The Grug Brained Developer (2022)

(grugbrain.dev)
1087 points smartmic | 3 comments | 17 Jun 25 20:24 UTC | HN request time: 0.63s | 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. cyberax ◴[18 Jun 25 11:56 UTC] No.44309088[source]▶
> 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.

Sigh. Same. To a large extent, this is caused by debuggers just sucking for async/await code. And just sucking in general for webdev.

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2. sensanaty ◴[18 Jun 25 13:23 UTC] No.44309684[source]▶
I try all the time, but I always end up having to wrestle a trillion calls into some library code that has 0 relevance to me, and if the issue is happening at some undetermined point in the chain, you basically have to step through it all to get an idea for where things are going wrong.

On the other hand, the humble console.log() just works without requiring insanely tedious and frustrating debugger steps.

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3. cyberax ◴[18 Jun 25 13:48 UTC] No.44309858[source]▶
I mean, "step over" and "go to line" exist...