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.
TensorFlow Incompatible Shapes Error: Debugging Shape Mismatch in Production
A practical guide to diagnosing and fixing TensorFlow shape mismatches, from understanding error messages to verifying the fix.
Diagnosing NumPy MemoryError When Allocating Large Arrays
A direct guide to diagnosing and resolving MemoryError when NumPy fails to allocate large arrays, including memory limits, dtype issues, and swap usage.
Jupyter Kernel Keeps Dying: Debugging and Fixes Guide
A practical guide to diagnosing why your Jupyter kernel repeatedly dies and restarts, with specific commands and root causes.
Kafka Consumer Lag Growing: Why Offsets Stall and How to Fix It
A practical guide to diagnosing and resolving Kafka consumer lag growth, covering configuration pitfalls, broker throttling, and rebalance storms.
Kafka Consumer Group Rebalance Storm Debugging
A practical guide to diagnosing and fixing Kafka consumer group rebalance storms—when frequent rebalances cause processing stalls and lag spikes.
RabbitMQ Messages Stuck Unacked: A Production Debugging Guide
A production-proven guide to diagnosing why RabbitMQ messages pile up as unacknowledged, from consumer stalls to prefetch traps.
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.