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.
Docker Volume Mount Not Showing Files: A Practical Debugging Guide
A hands-on guide to diagnosing Docker volume mounts that appear empty or fail to sync files, with real commands and common pitfalls.
Docker Healthcheck Always Failing: Diagnosis and Fixes
A practical guide to debugging Docker healthchecks that constantly fail. Covers common pitfalls like CMD syntax, exit codes, timing, and network dependencies.
Docker Compose depends_on Not Waiting – Why Your App Starts Before the Database Is Ready
Docker Compose's depends_on only waits for container start, not service readiness. This guide explains the difference and how to fix it with healthchecks and wait scripts.
Docker Compose Services Cannot Reach Each Other: A Debugging Guide
A practical guide to diagnosing and fixing network connectivity issues between services in Docker Compose, covering common misconfigurations and debugging commands.
Helm Chart Release Failed: Debugging Tillerless Deployments
A definitive guide to debugging failed Helm releases in Tillerless environments (Helm 3). Covers dry-run mismatches, hook failures, and resource conflicts.
Kubernetes Job Hangs: Debugging Pods That Never Complete
A Kubernetes Job pod stuck in Running or Pending state despite the container process appearing idle. Diagnose and fix common causes like missing termination, resource deadlocks, and probe misconfigurations.
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.