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.
IndexedDB Data Not Persisting: Silent Writes and Missing Transactions
When IndexedDB writes appear to succeed but data vanishes on reload, the root cause is almost always a mishandled transaction, quota error, or blocked upgrade. This guide exposes the real-world failures behind 'not storing data' and how to trace them.
Web Worker Communication Failures: Why postMessage Stops Working
A deep dive into why postMessage between main thread and web workers silently fails, covering cloning errors, closed ports, and structured clone algorithm limits.
Debugging Ruby Bundler Gem Conflict Errors
A practical guide to diagnosing and resolving gem dependency conflicts in Ruby Bundler, with real commands and war stories.
Rails Database Migration Error: Failed to Add Column Due to Lock Wait Timeout
A practical guide to diagnosing and fixing Rails migration failures caused by lock wait timeouts, schema inconsistencies, and database deadlocks in production.
Detecting and Fixing ActiveRecord N+1 Queries in Rails
A practical guide to identifying, diagnosing, and eliminating N+1 queries in Rails applications using Bullet, rack-mini-profiler, and eager loading.
How to Debug a Failing Sidekiq Job That Keeps Retrying
A practical guide to diagnosing and fixing Sidekiq jobs that fail and retry endlessly—covers real causes, commands, and fixes.
Long-form thinking on debugging habits, observability, and the systems around the bug.
Debugging CSS Layout Issues: A Systematic Approach to Fixing Broken Layouts
A practical, step-by-step system for diagnosing and fixing CSS layout bugs — from overflow and collapsing margins to flexbox and grid misbehavior. Includes real DevTools workflows and a war story from production.
Debugging Accessibility Violations: A Systematic Approach from Audit to Fix
A practical guide to identifying, triaging, and fixing accessibility violations in web applications, covering automated tools, manual testing techniques, and common pitfalls.
Find the Real Cause of a Slow Page: A Profiling Protocol for Engineers
A practical protocol for profiling web page performance — not a list of metrics, but a repeatable process for finding what actually slows down your users.
Tracking Down Memory Leaks in Browser JavaScript: A Practical Field Guide
Memory leaks in the browser are subtle and hard to reproduce. This guide covers practical techniques to detect, isolate, and fix them using Chrome DevTools, heap snapshots, and allocation timelines.
Why Your 60fps Animation Stutters: A Deep Dive Into the Browser Event Loop
The event loop isn't just about callbacks. It's about when and in what order the browser processes tasks, microtasks, and rendering. Here's what actually happens between frames.
Remote Debugging Mobile Devices at Scale: What Works and What Doesn't
Setting up remote debugging for iOS and Android devices involves more than just enabling Developer Mode. Here's what I've learned from debugging over 500 devices in production.