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 AWS API Gateway 502 Bad Gateway Errors
A practical guide to diagnosing and fixing 502 Bad Gateway errors from AWS API Gateway, covering common causes like VPC link misconfigurations, integration timeouts, and backend response formatting.
AWS RDS Connection Refused: Security Group Debug Guide
A practical guide to diagnosing and resolving RDS connection refused errors caused by security group misconfigurations, with real commands and war stories.
Custom Metrics Not Appearing in AWS CloudWatch: A Debugging Guide
Diagnose why your custom CloudWatch metrics are not showing up. Covers common causes like namespace mismatch, timestamp issues, and IAM permissions.
Debugging AWS SQS Message Visibility Timeout Causing Duplicate Processing
A practical guide to diagnosing and fixing duplicate message processing caused by visibility timeout misconfiguration in AWS SQS.
AWS CloudFront Serving Stale Content – Debugging Cache Invalidation Failures
A hands-on guide to diagnosing and fixing stale content served by CloudFront when cache invalidations don't work as expected.
Debugging AWS VPC Security Group Traffic Blocked
Step-by-step guide to diagnosing and fixing traffic blocked by AWS security groups. Covers common misconfigurations, hidden gotchas, and verification techniques.
Long-form thinking on debugging habits, observability, and the systems around the bug.
Debugging Webhook Delivery Failures: What the Logs Don't Tell You
HTTP 200 doesn't mean your webhook was processed. A practical guide to the network and middleware layers that silently drop webhooks.
Debugging HTTP Headers with curl: From Basic Flags to Packet-Level Inspection
A practical guide to inspecting HTTP request and response headers with curl, covering basic flags, debugging tricky issues, and understanding what your headers are really doing.
Debugging WebSocket Real-Time Features: Packet Loss, Reconnect Storms, and Silent Failures
WebSocket debugging goes beyond console.log. I cover packet capture with tcpdump, reconnect backoff strategies, and a war story about a silent failure that took down a production chat feature.
Rest API Design Mistakes That Inject Bugs Into Your System
Most API bugs aren't in the implementation—they're baked into the contract. Here are the design errors I've seen cause the most production incidents.
Blameless Postmortems: How We Fixed Root Causes Without Firing Anyone
A practical guide to running postmortems that focus on systemic failures, not individual mistakes. Includes a real incident breakdown from a production database outage.
Chaos Engineering at 3 AM: When Our Kubernetes Cluster Lost Its DNS
We ran a chaos experiment on our Kubernetes cluster and found a subtle DNS misconfiguration that would have caused a cascading failure. Here's how we did it and what we learned.