Hello World: My First Debug Story

Welcome to my little corner of the internet! 👋 This is where I document my adventures in code—the victories, the facepalms, and everything in between.

The Bug That Started It All

Picture this: it’s 11 PM, you’re on your third cup of coffee, and your code is doing something impossible.

const users = await fetchUsers();
console.log(users.length); // 5
console.log(users[0]); // undefined

How can an array have a length of 5 but no elements? Welcome to my Tuesday night.

The Investigation

After much hair-pulling, I discovered the culprit was a proxy object masquerading as an array. The API response looked normal in the network tab, but somewhere in our data layer, it got wrapped in a sneaky proxy.

// The problem
const handler = {
  get(target, prop) {
    if (prop === 'length') return 5; // Lies!
    return target[prop];
  }
};

// What I expected vs what I got
const fakeArray = new Proxy([], handler);
console.log(fakeArray.length); // 5
console.log(fakeArray[0]); // undefined

The Fix

The solution was embarrassingly simple once I found it:

// Convert the proxy back to a real array
const realUsers = Array.from(users);

Lessons Learned

1. Trust, but verify — console.log can lie to you when proxies are involved
2. Use Array.isArray() — it would have caught this immediately
3. Document weird bugs — future you will thank present you

Wrapping Up

This blog exists because I needed a place to record these moments. Not just the solutions, but the process. Because sometimes the journey through a bug is more educational than the fix itself.

Stay curious, and happy debugging! 🐛✨