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.
Hidden state bug in React form: how to debug stale closures and state issues
Your React form submits old values, or a callback sees stale state. A closure captured a variable from a previous render and never updated.
Production-only bug: a systematic debugging checklist
A bug only appears in production. You cannot reproduce it locally. Here is a systematic checklist to find environment-specific failures.
Diagnosing useEffect Infinite Loops in React Applications
A precise, engineer-focused guide to identifying and stopping infinite re-renders caused by useEffect loops in React, including subtle dependency pitfalls.
Tracking Down Node.js Memory Leaks in Production
Diagnosing and fixing Node.js memory leaks in real production systems, with step-by-step commands, signals, and non-obvious debugging tactics.
Pinpointing and Resolving TypeScript Type Errors in Complex Codebases
A detailed guide for engineers who need to systematically diagnose and resolve elusive TypeScript type errors in large, real-world projects.
Chasing Down the N+1 Query Problem in Production APIs
How to identify, analyze, and fix the N+1 query bug in backend APIs. Real commands, logs, and war stories from production-grade systems.
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.