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.
Prometheus Alert Not Firing: A Systematic Debugging Guide
A structured approach to diagnosing why a Prometheus alert rule isn't triggering, covering expression evaluation, staleness, relabeling, and configuration pitfalls.
Sentry Not Capturing Errors: A Debugging Guide
A direct guide to diagnosing why Sentry fails to capture errors in production, covering SDK misconfigurations, network issues, and rate limits.
Distributed Tracing Spans Not Connecting: A Debugging Guide
Guide to debugging missing parent-child connections in distributed traces, covering sampling mismatches, header propagation failures, and clock skew.
Correlation ID Not Propagating Across Asynchronous Boundaries
Debug why your distributed logging correlation ID disappears across async boundaries, thread pools, or event buses — with concrete commands and fix patterns.
CDN Cache Not Invalidating After Deploy – Debugging Stale Assets
A practical guide to diagnosing and fixing CDN cache invalidation failures after deployments, covering common misconfigurations, header issues, and verification steps.
HTTP ETag and Cache-Control Not Caching: Why Browsers Ignore Your Headers
A practical guide to debugging HTTP caching failures when ETag and Cache-Control headers are present but browsers or proxies refuse to cache responses.
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.