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.
ECS Task Definition Error: Why Your Container Won't Start
A focused guide for diagnosing ECS tasks stuck in provisioning or stop due to definition errors—image pull failures, IAM role misconfig, and resource limits.
AWS Secrets Manager Secret Retrieval Failing: Debug Guide
A practical guide to debugging 'AccessDeniedException' and 'ResourceNotFoundException' when retrieving secrets from AWS Secrets Manager.
AWS Cognito User Pool Authentication Error Debugging
A practical guide to diagnosing and fixing authentication errors in AWS Cognito User Pools, covering common misconfigurations, token issues, and SDK pitfalls.
AWS EventBridge Rule Not Triggering: Debugging Guide
A practical guide to diagnosing why an EventBridge rule isn't firing, covering event pattern mismatches, IAM misconfigurations, and throttling.
GCP Cloud Run Container Startup Timeout Debugging Guide
A practical guide to diagnosing and fixing container startup timeouts in Google Cloud Run, covering resource limits, health checks, and cold start optimization.
GCP Firestore Query Needs Index: Diagnosing and Fixing the Missing Index Error
A focused guide to diagnosing and fixing the 'index required' error in Google Cloud Firestore queries. Covers composite index creation, query structure pitfalls, and debugging with real examples.
Long-form thinking on debugging habits, observability, and the systems around the bug.
Five Debugging Habits That Separate Seniors from Juniors
It's not tools. It's not years of experience. It's five repeatable habits that senior engineers do reflexively and juniors haven't built yet.
Why Your Production Logs Are Lying to You
Logs tell you what the code reported. They almost never tell you what actually happened. Here is the gap, and how to close it.
The Real Cost of Console.log Debugging (and What to Use Instead)
Every engineer reaches for console.log. Most do not think about what it costs — in time, in performance, or in production readiness. Here is the honest accounting.
Interpreting Stack Traces: Practical Steps for Faster Debugging
Stack traces can be dense, but reading them fluently accelerates triage and root cause analysis. This article explains how to extract actionable information, with real-world context.
Efficient Debugging with git bisect: Going Beyond Binary Search
This article explains how to incorporate git bisect into your debugging workflow, focusing on practical execution, automation, and common edge cases.
Applying Rubber Duck Debugging to Complex Engineering Problems
Rubber duck debugging isn’t just a quirky solo exercise. I’ll show how explaining code out loud surfaces misunderstandings and reduces wasted team cycles.