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.
HTTP Connection Timeout: Debugging Network Stalls and Misconfigured Timeouts
A practical guide to diagnosing HTTP connection timeouts caused by network latency, firewall drops, TCP backlog exhaustion, and misconfigured timeout stack.
OAuth2 PKCE Code Challenge Verification Failed
This guide covers diagnosing and fixing PKCE code challenge verification failures in OAuth2 flows, including S256 hash mismatches and incorrect code verifier handling.
Debugging OAuth2 Authorization Code Flow Errors
A tactical guide to diagnosing failures in the OAuth2 authorization code flow, covering redirect URI mismatches, state validation, token endpoint issues, and common provider-specific pitfalls.
Debugging HTTP 429 Too Many Requests – API Rate Limit Guide
A hands-on guide to diagnosing, mitigating, and preventing HTTP 429 rate limit errors with specific tools and patterns.
WebSocket Connection Closing Unexpectedly: A Field Guide
A systematic approach to diagnosing why WebSocket connections drop, covering proxy timeouts, idle timeouts, load balancer quirks, and client-side keepalive failures.
Debugging gRPC Status Code Errors: Root Causes and Fixes
A practical guide to debugging gRPC status code errors, covering non-obvious causes like proxy interference, deadline propagation, and client/server version mismatches.
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.