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.
ECS Task Definition Error: Why Your Container Won't Start
A focused guide for diagnosing ECS tasks stuck in provisioning or stop due to definition errors—image pull failures, IAM role misconfig, and resource limits.
AWS Secrets Manager Secret Retrieval Failing: Debug Guide
A practical guide to debugging 'AccessDeniedException' and 'ResourceNotFoundException' when retrieving secrets from AWS Secrets Manager.
AWS Cognito User Pool Authentication Error Debugging
A practical guide to diagnosing and fixing authentication errors in AWS Cognito User Pools, covering common misconfigurations, token issues, and SDK pitfalls.
AWS EventBridge Rule Not Triggering: Debugging Guide
A practical guide to diagnosing why an EventBridge rule isn't firing, covering event pattern mismatches, IAM misconfigurations, and throttling.
GCP Cloud Run Container Startup Timeout Debugging Guide
A practical guide to diagnosing and fixing container startup timeouts in Google Cloud Run, covering resource limits, health checks, and cold start optimization.
GCP Firestore Query Needs Index: Diagnosing and Fixing the Missing Index Error
A focused guide to diagnosing and fixing the 'index required' error in Google Cloud Firestore queries. Covers composite index creation, query structure pitfalls, and debugging with real examples.
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.