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.
PostgreSQL UUID Primary Key Performance: Debugging Index Bloat and Insert Slowdowns
A direct guide to diagnosing and fixing UUID primary key performance problems in PostgreSQL—index bloat, random writes, and cache thrashing.
Postgres Advisory Lock Not Releasing: A Debugging Guide
Practical debugging guide for PostgreSQL advisory locks that won't release. Covers session management, connection pooling, transaction scoping, and stuck backends.
Debugging MySQL Replication Lag: From Seconds to Hours
A practical guide to diagnosing and fixing MySQL replication lag that spikes from seconds to hours, covering both obvious and subtle causes.
MySQL Index Merge Causing Slow Queries: How to Detect and Fix
Diagnose and fix slow queries caused by MySQL index merge. Learn to identify when index_merge is harmful and how to force single-index scans.
MySQL utf8mb4 Encoding Error When Storing Emoji
A step-by-step guide to diagnosing and fixing MySQL utf8mb4 encoding errors that prevent storing emoji characters in your database.
MySQL Lock Wait Timeout Exceeded: A Practical Debugging Guide
A hands-on guide to diagnosing and fixing MySQL 'Lock wait timeout exceeded' errors, covering real-world cases, transaction isolation traps, and deadlock prevention.
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.