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.
GraphQL Subscription WebSocket Not Receiving Events
A step-by-step debugging guide for when GraphQL subscriptions fail silently over WebSocket—no events, no errors, just silence.
Apollo Client Cache Not Updating After Mutation: How to Force a Normalized Cache Refresh
If Apollo Client returns stale data after a mutation, your normalized cache isn't merging correctly. Here's how to diagnose cache policies, field merge functions, and cache redirects.
Svelte Store Not Updating Component – Reactive Assignment Pitfalls
Learn how to debug a Svelte store that doesn't trigger component re-renders. Covers reactive assignments, store subscriptions, and common Svelte reactivity gotchas.
Debugging Apollo Federation Subgraph Errors: A Field Guide
A practical guide to diagnosing and resolving errors from Apollo Federation subgraphs, including type resolution failures, entity lookup issues, and gateway-subgraph communication problems.
Svelte Reactive Statement Not Re-running After State Change
A deep guide to debugging Svelte reactive statements that fail to re-run: covering dependency tracking pitfalls, stale closures, and assignment traps.
SvelteKit load function errors: root cause analysis and fix patterns
A practical guide to diagnosing and fixing errors in SvelteKit load functions, covering server vs client context, serialization issues, and timing pitfalls.
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.