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.
Kubernetes pod CrashLoopBackOff: how to debug crashing pods
Your pod starts, crashes, restarts, crashes again. The CrashLoopBackOff status means Kubernetes is giving up. The pod logs hold the answer.
SSL certificate error after deployment: how to debug TLS issues
Your site was working with HTTPS. After a deployment, browsers show SSL errors. The certificate expired, was not renewed, or the domain changed.
Frontend build works locally but fails on Vercel or Render: how to debug it
Your build command succeeds locally but fails when Vercel or Render runs it. The platform has a different Node version, memory limit, or build settings.
API timeout: how to debug request timeout issues
Your API endpoint returns a timeout error. The request takes longer than the configured timeout, but the operation might have succeeded silently on the server.
Duplicate emails sent by retry bug: how to debug it
Your email service retries a failed send, but the first send actually succeeded. Users get two, three, or ten copies of the same email.
Pagination off by one bug: how to debug pagination errors
Your paginated list skips the first item, shows the last item twice, or has an empty last page. The offset, limit, or page calculation is off by one.
Long-form thinking on debugging habits, observability, and the systems around the bug.
Logs, Traces, and the Lies They Tell: Debugging a Stuck Queue in Production
A single stuck queue brought down an entire checkout flow. Here's how we traced the failure across services, what the logs didn't say, and the tools that finally showed the truth.
Pair Debugging: How to Debug Together Without Killing Each Other
Pair debugging sounds great on paper. In practice, it's easy to step on each other's toes, go silent, or fight over the keyboard. Here's how to make it work.
Debugging with AI Tools: What Worked and What Didn't in Production
After a year of using GPT-4, Copilot, and Claude to hunt production bugs, here's what actually helped — and what sent me down dead ends.
How to Debug Legacy Code Without Losing Your Mind
A pragmatic approach to debugging code you didn't write, with techniques for tracing execution, isolating side effects, and making safe edits.
Debugging Feature Flag Rollouts: Tracing the Live-at-5 Incident
A misconfigured feature flag triggered a cascading failure in production. Here's how we traced the root cause and built a better debugging toolkit.
How to Ask for Debugging Help Without Wasting Everyone's Time
Asking for debugging help is a skill. Here's how to provide enough context, show your work, and frame the problem so others can actually help you.