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The Grug Brained Developer (2022)

(grugbrain.dev)
1087 points smartmic | 3 comments | 17 Jun 25 20:24 UTC | HN request time: 0.816s | 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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roncesvalles ◴[18 Jun 25 00:12 UTC] No.44305375[source]▶
I'd love to use a real debugger but as someone who has only ever worked at large companies, this was just never an option. In a microservices mesh architecture, you can't really run anything locally at all, and the test environment is often not configured to allow hooking up a stepping debugger. Print debugging is all you have. If there's a problem with the logging system itself or something that crashes the program before the logs can flush, then not even that.
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1. soseng ◴[18 Jun 25 19:51 UTC] No.44312810[source]▶
Curious to learn more about why it is difficult to debug. I'm not familiar with service mesh. I also work at a large corp, but we use gateways and most things are event driven with kafka across domain boundaries. I spend most of my time debugging each service locally by injecting mock messages or objects. I do this one at a time if the problem is upstream. Usually, our logging helps us pinpoint the exact service at to target for debugging. It's really easy. Our devops infrastructure has built out patterns and libraries when teams need to mint a new service. Everything is standardized with terraform. Everything has the same standard swagger pages, everything is using okta, etc.. Seems a bit boring (which is good)
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2. theshrike79 ◴[18 Jun 25 20:28 UTC] No.44313032[source]▶
It's easy if Someone(tm) has already set up a system where you can whip up the relevant bits with something like localstack.

But if there is no support from anyone and you'll be starting from scratch, you've print-debugged and fixed the issue before you get the debugger attached to anything relevant.

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3. soseng ◴[18 Jun 25 20:41 UTC] No.44313112[source]▶
I suppose in the description of "large corp" and service mesh, Someone would already exist and this would already have been worked out. It would be a nightmare dealing with hundreds of microservices without this kind of game plan.