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.
ESLint Rule Conflict: How to Diagnose and Fix Competing Linter Directives
A complete guide to resolving ESLint rule conflicts where two or more rules produce contradictory outcomes, breaking your lint pipeline or CI.
Nx Affected Command Not Detecting Changes: Debugging Guide
When `nx affected` commands fail to see your changes, the cause is almost always a mismatch between the git base and the project graph. This guide shows you exactly how to diagnose and fix it.
ArgoCD Application Sync Failed: A Hands-On Debugging Guide
A practical guide to diagnosing and fixing ArgoCD application sync failures, covering common root causes like out-of-cluster state, resource conflicts, and network issues.
semantic-release Not Creating a Release: Debugging the Silent Fail
A practical guide to debugging why semantic-release runs without errors but produces no release. Covers token issues, commit message parsing, and GitHub branch protection.
Husky Git Hook Not Running: Why Your Pre-commit or Commit-msg Hook is Silently Skipped
Diagnose why Husky hooks are not executing despite being installed. Covers .git/hooks issues, path problems, and permission errors.
How to Debug SSL Certificate Errors: Self-Signed Certificates in HTTPS
A practical guide to debugging 'self-signed certificate' errors in HTTPS connections, covering diagnosis, root causes, and fixes for intermediate engineers.
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.