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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: 0.212s | 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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profsummergig ◴[18 Jun 25 16:44 UTC] No.44311403[source]▶
I want to master JS/React and Python debugging. Am an "advanced beginner" in both. What tools do you recommend?
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1. steve_adams_86 ◴[18 Jun 25 17:22 UTC] No.44311704[source]▶
For JavaScript, you're actually able to debug fairly easily by default by adding a `debugger()` call in your code. Browsers will stop at that call, and start the debugger.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

Another way (and probably a better idea) is creating a launch definition for VS Code in launch.json which attaches the IDE's debugger to Chrome. Here is an article describing how that works: https://profy.dev/article/debug-react-vscode

Breakpoints are nice because they can't accidentally get shipped to production like debugger calls can.

For Python I essentially do the same thing, minus involving Chrome. I run the entry point to my application from launch.json, and breakpoints in the IDE 'just work'. From there, you can experiment with how the debugger tools work, observe how state change as the application runs, etc.

If you don't use VS Code, these conventions are similar in other IDEs as well.