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The Grug Brained Developer (2022)

(grugbrain.dev)
1087 points smartmic | 1 comments | 17 Jun 25 20:24 UTC | HN request time: 0.215s | 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. DangitBobby ◴[18 Jun 25 14:21 UTC] No.44310156[source]▶
Sometimes I need a debugger because there's a ton of variables or I just have no idea what's wrong and that's the easiest way to see everything that's going on. It's really frustrating to feel like I need a debugger and don't have a good way to add the IDEs visual debugger (because I'm using a CLI on a remote session or something). It's also really frustrating to be inside a debugging session and wish you knew what the previous value for something was but you can't because you can't go backwards in time. That happens so often to me, in fact, that print debugging is actually more effective for me in the vast majority of cases.