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.
18 playbooks · 509 guides · 96 articles · 13 linked practice labs ·skip to practice
Fast pattern recognition for the production failures engineers see most often.
18 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.
Configuration Options Not Binding in .NET: How to Debug
A practical guide to debugging .NET configuration binding failures, covering real-world causes like casing mismatches, missing sections, and premature validation.
Elixir GenServer call timeout: How to find and fix the real cause
A hands-on guide for debugging Elixir GenServer call timeouts: from symptoms and root causes to specific fixes and verification steps, with a real incident walkthrough.
Phoenix LiveView assign not updating UI: Debugging Stale State
A practical guide to debugging Phoenix LiveView UI that doesn't update after an assign change. Covers socket diffs, Ecto schema reloads, and dead-end pitfalls.
Debugging Ecto N+1 Preload Queries in Elixir
Identify and fix N+1 query problems caused by Ecto preload misuse in Elixir/Phoenix applications.
Elixir Process Mailbox Overflow: How to Diagnose and Fix Unbounded Message Accumulation
Diagnose and fix Elixir process mailbox growth that causes memory pressure, latency spikes, and crashes. Covers OTP mailbox internals, redbug, recon, and practical fixes.
Kotlin Coroutine Not Cancelling: Debugging Stuck Jobs
A practical guide to debugging Kotlin coroutines that ignore cancellation, covering common pitfalls like blocking calls, uncooperative suspend functions, and improper scope management.
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.