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.
Cron job not running in production: how to debug scheduled tasks
Your cron job runs fine when triggered manually but never fires on its schedule in production. The scheduler, timezone, or environment is wrong.
Worker process memory leak: how to find and fix memory leaks in background jobs
Your background worker's memory usage grows steadily until it crashes. The leak is accumulating across jobs — each job leaves something behind.
Rate limit bug: how to debug unexpected rate limiting issues
Legitimate users are hitting rate limits. The limiter is too aggressive, counting wrong, or sharing state across instances when it should not.
Request body undefined in Express: how to debug missing request bodies
Your Express route handler receives `req.body` as `undefined` or an empty object. The body parser is missing, misconfigured, or not matching the content type.
ESM CommonJS import error: how to debug module system conflicts
Your import breaks with 'require is not defined' or 'Cannot use import outside a module'. The file is being treated as the wrong module system.
GitHub Actions missing secret: how to debug CI secret issues
Your GitHub Actions workflow references a secret that does not exist in the repository settings. The workflow fails with an empty value or an error.
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.