Re:The Grug Brained Developer (2022)
by _rm on Thursday June 19, 2025 @01:15AM
(#44315651)
Debuggers are great. I too have tried and failed to spread their use.
But the reason is simple: they are always 100x harder to set up and keep working than just type a print statement and be done with it.
Especially when you're in a typical situation where an app has a big convoluted docker based setup, and with umpteen packers & compilers & transpilers etc.
This is why all software companies should have at least one person tasked with making sure there are working debuggers everywhere, and that everyone's been trained how to use them.
There should also be some kind of automated testing that catches any failures in debugging tooling.
But that effort's hard to link directly to shipped features, so if you started doing that, management would home in on that dev like a laser guided missile and task him to something with "business value", thereby wasting far more dev time and losing far more business value.
But the reason is simple: they are always 100x harder to set up and keep working than just type a print statement and be done with it.
Especially when you're in a typical situation where an app has a big convoluted docker based setup, and with umpteen packers & compilers & transpilers etc.
This is why all software companies should have at least one person tasked with making sure there are working debuggers everywhere, and that everyone's been trained how to use them.
There should also be some kind of automated testing that catches any failures in debugging tooling.
But that effort's hard to link directly to shipped features, so if you started doing that, management would home in on that dev like a laser guided missile and task him to something with "business value", thereby wasting far more dev time and losing far more business value.