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.
Debugging Node.js Cluster Module Worker Crashes
A hands-on guide to diagnosing and fixing worker crashes in Node.js cluster mode, covering uncaught exceptions, memory leaks, and IPC failures.
Debugging TypeScript Generic Type Constraint Errors
A practical guide to diagnosing and fixing TypeScript errors when generic type parameters violate their constraints, with real-world debugging strategies and a war story.
Mapped Types Returning 'never' or 'unknown' — What Your IDE Won't Tell You
A field guide for when mapped types silently collapse to 'never' or 'unknown', covering conditional checks, key remapping, and distributive conditional types.
JavaScript Closure Stale Variable Inside Loop
A debugging guide for the classic JavaScript closure-in-loop bug where callbacks capture the final value of a loop variable instead of each iteration's value.
TypeScript Discriminated Union Type Narrowing Not Working
A practical debugging guide for when TypeScript's discriminated union type narrowing fails due to common pitfalls like excess property checks, optional discriminants, and type assertions.
Debugging Prototype Chain Inheritance Bugs in JavaScript
A guide to diagnosing and fixing subtle bugs caused by shared state and unintended property shadowing in JavaScript prototype chains.
Long-form thinking on debugging habits, observability, and the systems around the bug.
How to Reproduce a Flaky Test: From CI Logs to Reliable Failure
A practical guide to turning intermittent test failures into reliably reproducible bugs, with techniques ranging from loop testing to thread sanitizers.
Property-Based Testing: Finding the Off-by-One That Lived in Production for 18 Months
A concrete story of how switching from example-based tests to property-based tests caught a timing bug that had survived code review, QA, and 18 months of production traffic.
How We Reduced End-to-End Test Flakiness by 80% with Deterministic Seeding
After months of chasing intermittent failures in our CI pipeline, we implemented a three-part strategy — deterministic seeding, isolated state per test, and a structured retry budget — that cut flaky end-to-end test failures by 80%.
Snapshot Testing: The 5 Hidden Failure Modes That Will Break Your CI
Snapshot tests seem like a safety net, but they often hide real bugs, bloat diffs, and silently break your CI. Here are the five failure modes I've seen in production and how to fix them.
Testing Async Code: Avoiding Flakiness and False Positives in JavaScript
Async testing is full of traps: unhandled rejections, race conditions, and tests that pass when they shouldn't. Here's how to write reliable async tests in JavaScript.
Testing Error Handling Code Paths: A Practical Approach
Error handling code is often the least tested and most brittle. Here's how to cover those paths with fault injection, mocks, and chaos engineering.