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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: 0.237s | 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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kakuri ◴[18 Jun 25 18:09 UTC] No.44312050[source]▶
I loved Chrome's debugger for years, then build tools and React ruined debugging for me.

Built code largely works with source maps, but it fails often enough, and in bizarre ways, that my workflow has simply gone back to console logs.

React's frequent re-renders have also made breakpoints very unpleasant - I'd rather just look at the results of console logs.

Are there ways I can learn to continue enjoying the debugger with TS+React? It is still occasionally useful and I'm glad its there, but I have reverted to defaulting to console logs.

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1. dgb23 ◴[18 Jun 25 18:40 UTC] No.44312285[source]▶
Console logs in the browser have some unique advantages. You can assign the output to a variable, play with it etc.

But yes, any code that is inside jsx generally sucks to debug with standard tooling. There are browser plugins that help you inspect the react ui tree though.