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.
Redis Pub/Sub Subscriber Not Receiving Messages: A Debugging Guide
A practical guide to debugging Redis Pub/Sub when subscribers miss messages. Covers channel mismatches, client disconnections, and message ordering issues.
Redis Cluster Slot Migration Error: Diagnosis and Fix
A practical guide to diagnosing and resolving slot migration errors in Redis Cluster, covering common causes, verification steps, and real-world fixes.
Prisma Migration Drift: Schema Mismatch Between Generated Client and Database
When Prisma's generated client doesn't match the actual database schema, migrations fail or produce inconsistent results. This guide covers detection, root causes, and fixes for schema drift.
How to Find and Fix Prisma N+1 Queries with include and select
A practical guide to debugging N+1 query problems in Prisma when using include and select, with real commands and specific fixes.
TypeORM Relation Eager vs Lazy Loading Errors: Debugging Unexpected Query Behavior
When TypeORM relations load too many or too few rows, the culprit is often a mix of eager and lazy loading settings. This guide covers debugging unexpected query patterns and fixing silent performance issues.
Debugging GraphQL N+1 Queries with DataLoader Batching
When DataLoader batching fails, GraphQL resolvers generate cascading database queries that kill performance. This guide shows you how to find, fix, and verify the N+1 pattern with concrete tools.
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.