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.
18 playbooks · 509 guides · 96 articles · 13 linked practice labs ·skip to practice
Fast pattern recognition for the production failures engineers see most often.
18 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.
TLS Handshake Failure: Connection Reset Debugging Guide
A practical guide for diagnosing and fixing TLS handshake failures that manifest as connection resets, covering packet-level analysis, cipher mismatches, and server-side issues.
OpenTelemetry Metrics Not Exporting: A Field Guide
A direct, actionable guide for debugging OpenTelemetry metrics that fail to export. Covers collector configuration, SDK timing, and common silent failures.
Astro Component Hydration Not Working: Debugging Missing Client-Side Interactivity
A debugging guide for Astro components that fail to hydrate: symptoms, root causes, diagnosis steps, and fixes for missing client-side interactivity.
Debugging TypeScript Module Augmentation When It Silently Fails
A direct guide to diagnosing why your TypeScript module augmentation doesn't take effect, covering ambient module declarations, import side effects, and module resolution quirks.
Postgres Sequence Gaps in SERIAL ID: Why They Happen and How to Stop Panicking
A no-fluff guide to understanding why Postgres serial IDs have gaps, how to identify the cause, and when to actually worry.
CSS Modules Class Not Found: Why Your Imported Styles Object Returns Undefined
When a CSS Modules class import resolves to undefined at runtime, the root cause is almost always a misconfiguration in your build pipeline. This guide walks through the five real reasons it happens and how to fix each one.
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.