From glitch to fix: what a real debugging session taught me about find the 😘 emoji in Italian

Source: Dev.to

Introduction

In the world of software development, clear documentation and fast bug resolution through shared debugging are key factors for the success of any project, especially in teams working across multiple stacks with fast release cycles.

Imagine, for simplicity, that you’re building an app to search for emojis using their Italian names (e.g. 😘 EN = Kiss, IT = Bacio). The system offers emoji filtering and suggestion features through APIs, paired with a dynamic interface and smooth user experience.

The Problem

When application glitches or integration issues arise, bugs slow development down. They trigger long debugging sessions scattered across tickets, videos, logs, and meetings, ultimately wasting time on low‑value work.

Within a web application, page transitions can sometimes lead to incorrect or slow image loading. The user notices a glitch and files a report. In such cases:

• The QA team struggles to reproduce the issue precisely.
• Frontend and backend teams each see only their own slice of information.
• Traditional workflows often result in back‑and‑forth emails, poorly detailed tickets, fragmented logs, and long calls filled with awkward silence.

This “treasure hunt” increases MTTR (Mean Time to Repair) and frustration. Even during a bug‑fixing sprint, an organized, transparent structure and traceability are essential for faster, higher‑quality development.

A Full‑Stack Session Replay Solution

I experimented with Multiplayer.app, which offers full‑stack session replay. Every user session is automatically saved and enriched with:

• Frontend events (DOM changes, clicks, inputs, navigation)
• Backend traces and logs tied to those actions
• Detailed API requests and responses
• Annotations from stakeholders (QA, developers, support, etc.)

When the QA team identifies a bug, they simply share the replay link. The link contains the sequence of events, correlated API calls, backend logs, and the user’s view, all cross‑referenced and fully navigable. This eliminates long videos and indecipherable tickets, creating a unified collaboration surface that accelerates reproduction and resolution.

Integration

Integrating Multiplayer.app into a project is straightforward:

1. Chrome extension – install from the Chrome Web Store.
2. JavaScript library – add via an mcp.json configuration file, which links your development environment (e.g., VS Code, WebStorm) to the Multiplayer App server through the public API.

The configuration defines the MCP server (Model Context Protocol) URL and gives copilots and your IDE access to the full system context: user actions, logs, requests and responses, custom headers, plus user annotations. This enables analysis of the shared state of the frontend, development context, and code changes, including any newly introduced issues.

Benefits of Shared Session Replay

• Unified view of frontend, backend, and network activity.
• Annotations allow every team member to add notes, hypotheses, and visual highlights directly on the timeline, reducing scattered information across Slack channels and emails.
• Reproducibility: bugs can be reproduced precisely in a test environment without interpreting vague reports.
• Accelerated fixes: developers can trace issues back to the exact request or rendering step that caused them.
• Validation: fixes can be verified through session replay and automated tests generated from real sessions.

Case Study: Emoji Search App

While building the emoji search app, I encountered a seemingly simple yet surprisingly tricky issue: a transition between two pages where emojis were loaded dynamically. Sometimes the images loaded smoothly; other times they froze or were heavily delayed, causing a poor user experience.

Challenges

• Intermittent, non‑reproducible bug.
• Involved both frontend DOM/rendering logic and asynchronous backend API calls.
• No clear errors in traditional logs.
• Lack of a single shared context correlating user actions, network traffic, and backend events.

Solution with Multiplayer.app

Full‑stack session replay recorded every user action, API call, backend event, and client‑side rendering step in a synchronized timeline. This made it easy to trace the issue back to the specific request that caused the loading freeze across the two pages.

Outcome

• Precise reproduction of the bug in a test environment.
• Implementation of a backend fix to optimize the loading pipeline and improve frontend fallback handling.
• Validation of the fix through session replay and automated tests based on the recorded session.

Conclusion

Debugging works best when the application is well‑tested and when teams have collaborative processes that provide a shared, searchable view of every relevant event. Tools like Multiplayer.app, which record full‑stack sessions and allow annotations, enable teams to reconstruct critical steps leading to an issue, reduce MTTR, and improve overall development velocity.