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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: 0.565s | 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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connicpu ◴[18 Jun 25 14:52 UTC] No.44310430[source]▶
I love debuggers, but unfortunately at my current job I've found that certain things we do to make our application more performant (mainly using giant structs full of fixed size arrays allocated at the start of the application) cause LLDB to slow to a crawl when `this` points to them. It really really doesn't like trying to read the state of a nearly 1GB struct...
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1. oehpr ◴[18 Jun 25 15:00 UTC] No.44310505[source]▶
This is one of those reasons why you really really need to get other people on board with your workflows. If you're the only one who works like that and someone does something insane, but it technically works, but it blows your workflow up... that's your problem. "You should just develop how I'm developing. Putting in a print statement for every line then waiting 5 minutes for the application to compile."

So long as no one sees your workflow as valuable, they will happily destroy it if it means getting the ticket done.