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.
PostgreSQL UUID Primary Key Performance: Debugging Index Bloat and Insert Slowdowns
A direct guide to diagnosing and fixing UUID primary key performance problems in PostgreSQL—index bloat, random writes, and cache thrashing.
Postgres Advisory Lock Not Releasing: A Debugging Guide
Practical debugging guide for PostgreSQL advisory locks that won't release. Covers session management, connection pooling, transaction scoping, and stuck backends.
Debugging MySQL Replication Lag: From Seconds to Hours
A practical guide to diagnosing and fixing MySQL replication lag that spikes from seconds to hours, covering both obvious and subtle causes.
MySQL Index Merge Causing Slow Queries: How to Detect and Fix
Diagnose and fix slow queries caused by MySQL index merge. Learn to identify when index_merge is harmful and how to force single-index scans.
MySQL utf8mb4 Encoding Error When Storing Emoji
A step-by-step guide to diagnosing and fixing MySQL utf8mb4 encoding errors that prevent storing emoji characters in your database.
MySQL Lock Wait Timeout Exceeded: A Practical Debugging Guide
A hands-on guide to diagnosing and fixing MySQL 'Lock wait timeout exceeded' errors, covering real-world cases, transaction isolation traps, and deadlock prevention.
Long-form thinking on debugging habits, observability, and the systems around the bug.
Documenting Bugs: A Postmortem-Driven Approach That Cut Recurrence by 60%
Most bug write-ups are useless. Here's a structured, postmortem-driven approach that reduced bug recurrence by 60% in our team — with templates and a real incident walkthrough.
Debugging Inside Docker Containers: Tools, Techniques, and a War Story
Practical techniques for debugging inside Docker containers: exec, nsenter, strace, and a real incident that made me rethink debug images.
kubectl logs: Debugging Pods with Logs, Timestamps, and Previous Instances
Beyond `kubectl logs pod-name` — using timestamps, previous instances, and multi-container patterns to diagnose real failures.
Debugging Serverless Functions Locally: A Practical Approach
Local debugging of serverless functions requires different tools and mindset than traditional apps. Here's how I approach it with real examples.
Debugging Terraform and CloudFormation Errors: A Field Guide to the 3 AM Page
Infrastructure-as-code errors are inevitable. Here's how to systematically debug Terraform and CloudFormation failures without losing your mind.
Debugging as Hypothesis Testing: A Mental Model for Systematic Root Cause Analysis
Most debugging is frantic guessing dressed up as experience. Here's a mental model that treats debugging as a scientific process — form hypotheses, design experiments, and isolate root causes systematically.