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.
IndexedDB Data Not Persisting: Silent Writes and Missing Transactions
When IndexedDB writes appear to succeed but data vanishes on reload, the root cause is almost always a mishandled transaction, quota error, or blocked upgrade. This guide exposes the real-world failures behind 'not storing data' and how to trace them.
Web Worker Communication Failures: Why postMessage Stops Working
A deep dive into why postMessage between main thread and web workers silently fails, covering cloning errors, closed ports, and structured clone algorithm limits.
Debugging Ruby Bundler Gem Conflict Errors
A practical guide to diagnosing and resolving gem dependency conflicts in Ruby Bundler, with real commands and war stories.
Rails Database Migration Error: Failed to Add Column Due to Lock Wait Timeout
A practical guide to diagnosing and fixing Rails migration failures caused by lock wait timeouts, schema inconsistencies, and database deadlocks in production.
Detecting and Fixing ActiveRecord N+1 Queries in Rails
A practical guide to identifying, diagnosing, and eliminating N+1 queries in Rails applications using Bullet, rack-mini-profiler, and eager loading.
How to Debug a Failing Sidekiq Job That Keeps Retrying
A practical guide to diagnosing and fixing Sidekiq jobs that fail and retry endlessly—covers real causes, commands, and fixes.
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.