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.
AWS DynamoDB Throttling: Provisioned Throughput Exceeded Debugging Guide
A hands-on guide to diagnosing and fixing DynamoDB throttling errors caused by exceeded provisioned throughput, with real-world tactics and a war story.
AWS Step Functions State Machine Failed: Debugging Execution Failures
A practical guide to diagnosing and fixing AWS Step Functions execution failures, covering common causes, quick diagnosis steps, and real-world debugging patterns.
Debugging AWS AppSync Resolver Mapping Errors
A practical guide to diagnosing and fixing VTL and JavaScript mapping errors in AWS AppSync resolvers, covering common pitfalls and production debugging techniques.
Debugging GCP Cloud SQL Connection Limit Exceeded
Diagnose and resolve 'too many connections' errors in GCP Cloud SQL with actionable steps, root causes, and a real-world incident.
Azure AD Authentication Token Error — A Practical Debugging Guide
A hands-on guide to diagnosing and fixing Azure AD token errors like AADSTS700016, 500208, and 65001. Covers common causes, quick diagnosis steps, and real-world fix patterns.
Azure Functions Cold Start: Diagnosing and Fixing Slow First Requests
A targeted guide for identifying and eliminating cold start latency in Azure Functions, covering platform settings, code patterns, and runtime diagnostics.
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.