Buglyst Blog
Learn to debug under pressure.
Playbooks for fast pattern recognition, guides for the full investigation, and articles for the engineering judgment around the edges.
17 playbooks · 509 guides · 95 articles · 12 linked practice labs ·skip to practice
Fast pattern recognition for the production failures engineers see most often.
17 playbooks
Debugging Env Var Issues
A concise checklist for incidents where local works but CI, staging, or production changes behavior.
Debugging Cache Stampedes
How to recognize and contain request spikes when cached data expires.
Debugging CORS Origin Bugs
A practical way to inspect origin parsing, credentials, and header behavior.
Debugging Retry Bugs
Retry issues often hide the first failure and create duplicate work.
Debugging Timezone Bugs
Time bugs usually live at day boundaries, DST changes, and unit conversions.
Debugging Pagination Bugs
Pagination bugs hide in boundary math, cursor reuse, and new records arriving between pages.
Structured investigations for the failure modes engineers meet in real systems.
Jest Module Mock Not Working: A Debugging Guide
A practical debugging guide for when Jest's jest.mock() doesn't actually mock the module, covering hoisting issues, path mismatches, and module caching.
Jest Fake Timers Not Advancing — Why setTimeout/setInterval Never Fire
A firefighting guide for when Jest's fake timers stall — timers don't advance, tests hang, or assertions time out. Covers the real root causes like legacy vs modern timer API, async gaps, and jest.useFakeTimers() placement.
Jest Async Test Timeout Exceeded: Root Causes and Debugging Steps
A practical guide to diagnosing and fixing Jest async test timeouts, covering promise hanging, done() misuse, and timeout configuration.
Vitest Coverage Not Collecting: Debugging Empty or Missing Coverage Reports
A direct guide to diagnosing why Vitest coverage reports come empty or missing, with concrete commands, config checks, and a real incident walkthrough.
Playwright Locator Not Found: Selector Timeout & Element Resolution
Diagnose and fix Playwright's 'locator not found' error with concrete debugging steps, common causes, and a production war story.
Playwright route.intercept Not Working: Silent Failures and Missing Requests
When route interception silently fails in Playwright, requests pass through unmodified. This guide covers real causes: glob patterns, method scope, page lifecycle, and route handler ordering.
Long-form thinking on debugging habits, observability, and the systems around the bug.
Why Your P99 Latency Is Lying to You (and What to Use Instead)
The 99th percentile is the go-to metric for tail latency, but it's easy to fool. Here's a real outage caused by trusting P99, and how to build a more honest monitoring stack.
The Real Cost of N+1 Queries: More Than Just Slow Pages
N+1 queries are often dismissed as a minor performance issue, but their real cost goes far beyond slow page loads—think cascading timeouts, database meltdowns, and cloud bills that balloon overnight. Here's what you're actually paying for.
Reading Flame Graphs: The Non-Obvious Patterns That Reveal Real Bottlenecks
Flame graphs are everywhere in performance profiling, but most engineers only scratch the surface. Here are the patterns that actually tell you where your code is slow.
Print Debugging vs Debugger: When printf Wins and When It Fails
Printf debugging is dismissed as primitive, but in many real-world scenarios it's faster and more reliable than a full debugger. Here's the tradeoff with concrete examples from distributed systems and production incidents.
Writing Postmortems That Actually Improve Reliability
A postmortem that blames someone gets filed and forgotten. A postmortem that traces cause without blame becomes a reliability upgrade. Here's how to write the second kind, with a real example from an 18-hour DNS outage.
Feature Flag Debt: When Your 500 Conditional Branches Become the Incident
Feature flags are great until they're not. Here's how to audit, remove, and automate cleanup before your 500th conditional branch becomes the root cause of a production incident.