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.
Diagnosing and Fixing Goroutine Leaks in Go
A practical guide to detecting goroutine leaks in Go: tools, patterns, and real-world fixes.
Debugging Go Channel Deadlock: All Goroutines Are Asleep
How to diagnose and fix the 'fatal error: all goroutines are asleep - deadlock!' panic in Go programs, covering sync.WaitGroup misuse, unbuffered channel patterns, and circular channel dependencies.
Golang Interface Nil vs Pointer Nil: Why They're Not Equal and How to Debug
Understand why a Go interface holding a nil pointer is not equal to nil, with real debugging steps and a production incident.
Debugging Go JSON Unmarshal Unexpected Type Errors
A focused guide on diagnosing and fixing unexpected type errors during JSON unmarshaling in Go, with real-world examples and concrete debugging steps.
Debugging Go Context Cancellation That Doesn't Propagate
A practical guide to diagnosing why a canceled parent context in Go doesn't cancel its children, covering common pitfalls like forgotten WithCancel, goroutine leaks, and blocking operations.
Go Panic/Recover Not Catching: Why Your recover() Call Is Silently Failing
A deep dive into why recover() calls in Go fail to catch panics, covering deferred scoping, goroutine boundaries, and nil panics.
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.