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.
Redis Pub/Sub Subscriber Not Receiving Messages: A Debugging Guide
A practical guide to debugging Redis Pub/Sub when subscribers miss messages. Covers channel mismatches, client disconnections, and message ordering issues.
Redis Cluster Slot Migration Error: Diagnosis and Fix
A practical guide to diagnosing and resolving slot migration errors in Redis Cluster, covering common causes, verification steps, and real-world fixes.
Prisma Migration Drift: Schema Mismatch Between Generated Client and Database
When Prisma's generated client doesn't match the actual database schema, migrations fail or produce inconsistent results. This guide covers detection, root causes, and fixes for schema drift.
How to Find and Fix Prisma N+1 Queries with include and select
A practical guide to debugging N+1 query problems in Prisma when using include and select, with real commands and specific fixes.
TypeORM Relation Eager vs Lazy Loading Errors: Debugging Unexpected Query Behavior
When TypeORM relations load too many or too few rows, the culprit is often a mix of eager and lazy loading settings. This guide covers debugging unexpected query patterns and fixing silent performance issues.
Debugging GraphQL N+1 Queries with DataLoader Batching
When DataLoader batching fails, GraphQL resolvers generate cascading database queries that kill performance. This guide shows you how to find, fix, and verify the N+1 pattern with concrete tools.
Long-form thinking on debugging habits, observability, and the systems around the bug.
The Art of the Minimal Reproducible Example: A Debugging Superpower
A minimal reproducible example (MRE) is more than just a snippet — it's a tool that isolates the bug, saves time, and gets you faster answers. Here's how to build one that works, with a real-world war story.
Retry Storms: When Retries Make a Cascading Failure Worse
Retries seem like a safety net, but in a distributed system under load they can turn a small hiccup into a full outage. Here's how retry storms form and what to do about them.
Caching Bugs Are the Worst: A Postmortem on Stale Data Disasters
A deep dive into the most insidious caching bugs, with real postmortems and practical patterns to avoid stale-data disasters.
Observability vs. Monitoring: Why Your On-Call Rotation Still Wakes You Up at 3 AM
Monitoring tells you something is broken. Observability lets you figure out why—without guessing, without SSH, without restarting the pod.
Debugging Flaky Tests for Good: A Systematic Approach to Root Cause Analysis
Flaky tests waste time and erode trust. Here's how to find and fix the actual root cause instead of just rerunning.
Idempotency Keys: The Safety Net Your Payment API Needs
How idempotency keys prevent double charges, lost refunds, and data corruption in payment APIs. With real-world examples and edge cases you haven't considered.