The Grug Brained Developer (2022)

“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.

Using a debugger on my own code is easy and I love it. The second the debugger steps deep into one of the libs or frameworks I'm using, I'm lost and I hate it. That framework / lib easily has many ten thousands of person-hours under it's belly, and I'm way out of my league.

But you can just use the "step out" feature to get back out when you realise you've gone into a library function. Or "step over" when you can see you're about to go into one.