Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Grug Brained Developer (2022)

grugbrain.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 603 posts

Re: The Grug Brained Developer (2022)

#141

Post by bloomca »

titanomachy wrote: post #115

“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 s…

Personally, I think that debugger is very helpful in understanding what is going on, but once you are familiar with the code and data structures, I am very often pretty close in my assessment, so scanning code and inserting multiple print lines is both faster and more productive.

I only used debugger recently in C# and C, when I was learning and practicing them.

Re: The Grug Brained Developer (2022)

#142

Post by frollogaston »

kragen wrote: post #58
shadowgovt wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being at a firm where the decision to use C++ was made, the thought process went something like this: "We're going to need to fit parts of this into very constrained architectures." "Right, so we need a language that compiles directly to machine code with no runtime interpretation." "Which one should we use?" "What about Rust?" "I know zero Rust developers." "What about C++?" "I know twenty C++ developers and am conf…

How does someone know twenty C++ developers and zero C developers though?

Probably they know C but the project is complex enough to warrant something else. Personally I'd rather C++ not exist and it's just C and Rust, but I don't have a magic wand.

Re: The Grug Brained Developer (2022)

#143

Post by oh_my_goodness »

bloomca wrote: post #141
titanomachy wrote: post #115

“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 s…

Personally, I think that debugger is very helpful in understanding what is going on, but once you are familiar with the code and data structures, I am very often pretty close in my assessment, so scanning code and inserting multiple print lines is both faster and more productive. I only used debugger recently in C# and C, when I was learning and practicing them.

A lot of people think that. That's why it's important to read the essay.

Re: The Grug Brained Developer (2022)

#145

Post by PaulHoule »

GMoromisato wrote: post #98

One of the many ironies of modern software development is that we sometimes introduce complexity because we think it will "save time in the end". Sometimes we're right and it does save time--but not always and maybe not often. Three examples: DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) sometimes leads to premature abstraction. We think, "hey, I bet this pattern will get used elsewhere, so we need to abstract out the common parts of…

I still believe that most code, on average, is not DRY enough, but for projects I do on my own account I've recently developed a doctrine of "there are no applications, only screens" and funny enough this has been using HTMX which I think the author of that blog wrote.

Usually I make web applications using Sinatra-like frameworks like Flask or JAXB where I write a function that answers URLs that match a pattern and a "screen" is one or more of those functions that work together and maybe some HTML templates that go with them. For instance there might be a URL for a web page that shows data about a user, and another URL that HTMX calls when you flip a to change the status of that user.

Assuming the "application" has the stuff to configure the database connection and file locations and draw HTML headers and footers and such, there is otherwise little coupling between the screens so if you want to make a new screen you can cut and paste an old screen and modify it, or you can ask an LLM to make you a screen or endpoint and if it "vibe coded" you a bad screen you can just try again to make another screen. It can make sense to use inheritance or composition to make a screen that can be specialized, or to write screens that are standalone (other than fetching the db connection and such.)

The origin story was that I was working on a framework for making ML training sets called "Themis" that was using microservices, React, Docker and such. The real requirement was that we were (1) always adding new tasks, and (2) having to create simple but always optimized "screens" for those tasks because if you are making 20,000 judgements it is bad enough to click 20,000 times, if you have to click 4x for each one and it adds up to 80,000 you will probably give up. As it was written you had to write a bunch of API endpoints as part of a JAXB application and React components that were part of a monolithic React app and wait 20 minutes for typescript and Docker and javac to do their things and if you are lucky it boots up otherwise you have to start over.

I wrote up a criticism of Themis and designed "Nemesis" that was designed for rapid development of new tasks and it was a path not taken at the old job, but Nemesis and I have been chewing through millions of instances of tasks ever since.

Re: The Grug Brained Developer (2022)

#146

Post by nyarlathotep_ »

mattmanser wrote: post #69
jiggawatts wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep trying to explain this to tiny dev teams (1-2 people) that will cheerfully take a trivial web app with maybe five forms and split it up into “microservices” that share a database, an API Management layer, a queue for batch jobs to process “huge” volumes (megabytes) of data, an email notification system, an observablity platform (bespoke!) and then… and then… turn the trivial web forms into a SPA app because “t…

It's all they've seen. They don't get why they're doing it, because they're junior devs masquerading as architects. There's so many 'senior' or 'architect' level devs in our industry who are utterly useless. One app I got brought in late on the architect had done some complicated mediator pattern for saving data with a micro service architecture. They'd also semi-implemented DDD. It was a ten page form. Literally tha…

> It's all they've seen. They don't get why they're doing it, because they're junior devs masquerading as architects. There's so many 'senior' or 'architect' level devs in our industry who are utterly useless.

This is the real, actual conversation to be had about "AI taking jobs."

I've seen similar things a lot in the private sector.

There's just loads of people just flailing around doing stuff without really having any expertise other than some vague proxy of years of experience.

It's really not even exactly their fault (people have lives that don't revolve around messing about with software systems design, sure, and there's no good exposure to anything outside of these messes in their workplaces).

But, outside of major software firms (think banks, and other non-"tech" F500s; speaking from experience here) there's loads of people that are "Enterprise Architects" or something that basically spend 5 hours a day in meetings and write 11 lines of C# or something a quarter and then just adopt ideas they heard from someone else a few years back.

Software is really an utterly bizarre field where there's really nothing that even acts as valuable credentials or experience without complete understanding of what that "experience" is actually comprised of. I think about this a lot.

Re: The Grug Brained Developer (2022)

#147

Post by geophile »

titanomachy wrote: post #115

“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 s…

I am also in the camp that has very little use for debuggers.

A point that may be pedantic: I don't add (and then remove) "print" statements. I add logging code, that stays forever. For a major interface, I'll usually start with INFO level debugging, to document function entry/exit, with param values. I add more detailed logging as I start to use the system and find out what needs extra scrutiny. This approach is very easy to get started with and maintain, and provides powerful insight into problems as they arise.

I also put a lot of work into formatting log statements. I once worked on a distributed system, and getting the prefix of each log statement exactly right was very useful -- node id, pid, timestamp, all of it fixed width. I could download logs from across the cluster, sort, and have a single file that interleaved actions from across the cluster.

Re: The Grug Brained Developer (2022)

#148

Post by ern »

_shantaram wrote: post #10
ChrisArchitect wrote: post #7

might be some good points in here but it's sooo hard to read.

https://reidjs.github.io/grug-dev-translation/ :) (no affiliation, I enjoy the original and wish for it to reach as many people as possible)

Good one....I put it into Claude with a prompt to not change the meaning but make it more normal

Re: The Grug Brained Developer (2022)

#149

Post by magarnicle »

pixelatedindex wrote: post #109
magarnicle wrote: post #99

I know, I get it, but I've realised that I'm not actually grug-brained. The way my brain works, I remember things pretty well; I like to get into the details of systems. So if more complexity in the code means the app can do more or a task is automated away I'll make the change and know I'll be able to remember how it works in the future. This doesn't mean OP is bad advice, just make a conscious decision about what t…

The knowing how it works in the future should really just be comments, right? And if it’s a bit more complex, perhaps a markdown file in a docs folder or stuffed in a README? When working with a large enough organization, tribal knowledge is an invisible t-rex

I don't think comments can capture the complexity of everything - there's too much interaction between systems to explain it all. I'm probably unique here in that my tribe is just one person: I wouldn't recommend adopting a pet t-rex in a team.

Re: The Grug Brained Developer (2022)

#150

Post by pbh101 »

dkarl wrote: post #103
default-kramer wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm convinced that some people don't know any other way to break down a system into smaller parts. To these people, if it's not exposed as a API call it's just some opaque blob of code that cannot be understood or reused.

That's what I've observed empirically over my last half-dozen jobs. Many developers treat decomposition and contract design between services seriously, and work until they get it right. I've seen very few developers who put the same effort into decomposing the modules of a monolith and designing the interfaces between them, and never enough in the same team to stop a monolith from turning into a highly coupled amorph…

Maybe the friction imposed to mess up the well-factored microservice arch is sufficiently marginally higher than in the monolith that the perception of value in the factoring is higher, whereas the implicit expectation of factoring the monolith is that you’ll look away for five seconds and someone will ruin it.
Post reply on HN