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.
18 playbooks · 509 guides · 96 articles · 13 linked practice labs ·skip to practice
Fast pattern recognition for the production failures engineers see most often.
18 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.
Null Pointer from Kotlin Platform Types in Java Interop
A guide to debugging NullPointerException from platform types when calling Java code from Kotlin. Covers root causes, diagnosis, and fixes.
Android ANR (Application Not Responding) Debugging: From Input Dispatch to Watchdog Timeouts
A field guide for Android engineers on diagnosing and fixing Application Not Responding (ANR) errors, covering input dispatch, broadcast receivers, and service timeouts.
Debugging Excessive Recomposition in Jetpack Compose
A deep dive into identifying and fixing unnecessary recompositions in Jetpack Compose, covering state hoisting, stable types, and common anti-patterns.
Swift Retain Cycles in Closures: How to Find and Fix Them
A guide to diagnosing, fixing, and preventing retain cycles caused by closures in Swift, with real-world debugging steps and a detailed incident story.
SwiftUI View Not Updating When State Changes: A Field Guide
Your SwiftUI view stays stuck even though @State or @Published values change. This guide covers the real reasons—wrong view identity, unnecessary equatable conformance, and publishers on background queues—and how to fix them.
Swift Actor Data Race Concurrency Debugging: Real-World Race Conditions in Actors
A practical guide to debugging data races in Swift actors, covering reentrancy, priority inversion, and actor-isolated state corruption with real crash logs and diagnostic steps.
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.