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.
WebSocket Reconnect Storm & Thundering Herd Debugging
Diagnose and fix cascading WebSocket reconnection storms triggered by thundering herd patterns in distributed systems.
DNS Caching Stale Records: Why TTL Is Ignored and How to Fix It
A practical guide to debugging cases where DNS resolvers serve stale records past their TTL, covering common causes like resolver caches, stub resolvers, and low TTLs.
Debugging HTTP Keep-Alive Connection Reset by Peer
A practical guide to diagnosing and fixing 'connection reset by peer' errors on HTTP keep-alive connections, covering server, proxy, and network causes.
PostgreSQL Logical Replication Slot Lag: How to Diagnose and Fix WAL Buildup
A concise guide to diagnosing and resolving PostgreSQL logical replication slot lag, including WAL accumulation, consumer failures, and monitoring commands.
PostgreSQL TOAST Table Bloat: Diagnosis and Recovery
A practical guide to identifying, diagnosing, and fixing TOAST table bloat in PostgreSQL, including real commands and war stories.
MongoDB WriteConflict Transaction Retry: A Practical Debugging Guide
Step-by-step debugging guide for MongoDB WriteConflict errors in transactions, covering causes, diagnostics, and fixes.
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.