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.
Diagnosing Nuxt Hydration Mismatch Errors in Production
Hydration mismatch errors in Nuxt apps break SSR interactivity and can be tough to pinpoint. This guide walks through investigating, reproducing, and fixing these.
Vue Router Navigation Guard Blocking Route Transitions
Diagnose and resolve Vue Router navigation guards unexpectedly blocking route changes. Covers subtle mistakes and issues beyond standard docs.
Why Your Vue Composition API ref Isn’t Reactive
Vue’s Composition API refs sometimes fail to trigger reactivity. This guide covers subtle causes, practical debugging, and real-world fixes for non-reactive refs.
Diagnosing Missing Cookies in Nuxt SSR Server Context
Nuxt SSR often fails to read cookies server-side if headers are misrouted or missing. This guide shows where things break and how to reliably retrieve cookies in SSR.
Vue Watcher Causing Infinite Render Loop
Vue watch handlers sometimes trigger infinite update cycles. This guide detangles the real causes, not just the basics, and shows how to fix them.
Pinia Store State Not Persisting Across Page Reloads
Diagnosing and fixing issues when your Pinia store state resets on page reloads—even with plugins or localStorage configured.
Long-form thinking on debugging habits, observability, and the systems around the bug.
How to Read Error Messages: A Debugging Protocol
Most engineers skim error messages and miss the signal. Here's a repeatable protocol for extracting maximum information from stack traces, log lines, and crash dumps — with a real incident walkthrough.
When to Escalate a Bug: A Decision Framework for Junior and Mid-Level Engineers
A practical framework for junior and mid-level engineers to decide when to escalate a bug, with real-world examples and criteria beyond time spent.
Debugging vs. Firefighting: Why Treating Production Incidents as Debugging Sessions Fails
When production goes down, your brain wants to debug. That instinct costs you hours. Here's why firefighting requires a fundamentally different approach, and the specific process I use to switch modes.
Writing an Incident Runbook That Actually Gets Used in Production
A runbook isn't a document—it's a tool. Here's how to write one that reduces MTTR and doesn't embarrass you during the next PagerDuty alert.
Debugging a production incident with your boss on Slack: staying rational when everything is on fire
A personal account of debugging a cascading Redis failure while the VP of Engineering watched, and the mental models that kept the fix from turning into a rollback.
Reading Distributed Traces to Find Latency: A Field Guide
Tracing tools generate a firehose of data. Here's how to filter the signal from the noise and actually find the root cause of high latency.