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.

( 02 )Deep debugging guides

Structured investigations for the failure modes engineers meet in real systems.

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Guide

Stale lock bug: how locks that are never refreshed cause outages

A lock is acquired, the operation succeeds, but the lock is never released or refreshed. Other processes wait until the lock TTL expires, causing delays or outages.

JavaScript/Node runtime debugging
Guide

Tenant cache leak: how to debug cross-tenant data exposure through caching

A user from Tenant A sees data from Tenant B because the cache key does not include the tenant identifier. The cache is leaking data across tenants.

Database/debugging
Guide

Observability missing logs: how to debug gaps in logging and monitoring

A critical error happened in production but there are no logs for it. The log level is too high, logs are dropped under load, or the log pipeline has a silent failure.

Observability/performance debugging
Guide

Log says success but the user still fails: how to debug misleading logs

Your application logs 'Operation completed successfully' but the user sees an error or gets no result. The log is lying — it is logging intent, not outcome.

Observability/performance debugging
Guide

Background job stuck: how to debug jobs that never complete

A background job enters the queue, a worker picks it up, and then nothing. The job never completes, never fails, and never retries. It is stuck in limbo.

Observability/performance debugging
Guide

Race condition in payment flow: how to debug concurrent payment issues

Two requests hit the payment endpoint at the same time. Both check the balance, both see enough funds, and both deduct. The user is charged twice.

Auth/session/payment bugs
( 03 )Engineering articles

Long-form thinking on debugging habits, observability, and the systems around the bug.

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Article

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.

Frontend
Article

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.

Frontend
Article

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.

Performance
Article

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.

Memory
Article

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.

JavaScript
Article

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.

Tools