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.
Debugging Go HTTP Client Timeout Errors: Beyond the Obvious
A practical guide to identifying and fixing Go HTTP client timeout errors, covering net/http defaults, context deadlines, DNS issues, and connection pooling gotchas.
Debugging Go Test Race Conditions with t.Parallel()
A practical guide to diagnosing and fixing race conditions that appear when running Go tests with t.Parallel(), covering false sharing, shared state, and flaky CI failures.
gRPC Interceptor Not Executing in Go: Why Your Middleware Is Being Skipped
A debugging guide for when your gRPC interceptor in Go silently fails to execute, covering registration order, interceptor chaining, and server lifecycle quirks.
Debugging go.mod replace Directive Errors
A practical guide to diagnosing and fixing invalid, misconfigured, or conflicting replace directives in Go modules.
Golang sync.Mutex Deadlock: Detection and Resolution
A guide to identifying and fixing deadlocks caused by sync.Mutex in Go, covering detection, common causes, and practical fixes.
Fixing 'Type Does Not Satisfy Constraint' in Go Generics
A practical guide to diagnosing and resolving 'X does not satisfy constraint' errors when using Go generics with custom constraints.
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.