The Grug Brained Developer (2022)

“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.

Here is my circular argument against debuggers: if I learn to use a debugger, I will spend much, possibly most, of my time debugging. I'd rather learn how to write useful programs that don't have bugs. Most people believe this is impossible.

The trouble of course is that there is always money to be made debugging. There is almost no incentive in industry to truly eliminate bugs and, indeed, I would argue that the incentives in the industry actively encourage bugs because they lead to lucrative support contracts and large dev teams that spend half their time chasing down bugs in a never-ending cycle. If a company actually shipped perfect software, how could they keep extracting more money from their customer?