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.
JavaScript Long Task Blocking Main Thread: Diagnosis and Fixes
A practical guide to identifying and fixing JavaScript long tasks that block the browser's main thread, causing jank and poor user experience.
Debugging High Interaction to Next Paint (INP) Scores
A practical guide to diagnosing and fixing poor Interaction to Next Paint (INP) scores, covering event handler delays, rendering bottlenecks, and real-user monitoring.
Service Worker Serving Stale Content: A Debugging Guide
Diagnose and fix service workers that refuse to update cached assets, leaving users stuck on old JavaScript bundles or stale API responses.
Debugging JavaScript Garbage Collection Pauses That Kill Responsiveness
Learn how to identify and fix long GC pauses in Node.js and browser JavaScript using Chrome DevTools, Node --trace-gc, and heap snapshots.
OpenTelemetry Traces Not Appearing: Debugging Missing Spans in Production
A debugging guide for when OpenTelemetry traces are not appearing in your observability backend. Covers common and non-obvious causes like sampling misconfiguration, exporter timeouts, and context propagation failures.
Node.js CPU Profiling: Fixing a Stuck Event Loop in Production
A practical guide to diagnosing Node.js CPU spikes using flame graphs, perf, and async hooks. Includes a real incident where a JSON serialization loop blocked the event loop for 12 seconds.
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.