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.
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.