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.
React setState Called but State Not Updating: Real Debugging Steps
React state not updating after setState? Pinpoint hidden causes—like stale closures, async timing, or skipped re-renders—using targeted debugging tactics.
React.memo Fails to Prevent Re-render: Deep Props, Functions, and Traps
Debug React.memo not working: identify why supposedly memoized components still re-render, including deep prop equality, unstable functions, and context pitfalls.
Diagnosing 404s from Next.js API Routes That Should Exist
When your Next.js API route responds with a 404 despite existing, dig past simple typos. This guide covers real fixes, pitfalls, and non-obvious causes.
Next.js Middleware Not Executing on Expected Routes
Investigate why your Next.js middleware isn't firing as expected. This guide goes beyond basics and addresses subtle config, routing, and deployment issues.
Environment Variable Undefined at Runtime in Next.js Projects
Why and how Next.js environment variables end up undefined during runtime, including hidden build pitfalls. Step-by-step debugging for real production issues.
Diagnosing ‘React Hook Called Conditionally’ in Function Components
A hands-on guide to resolving errors from calling React hooks inside conditional blocks. Covers root causes, real-world mistakes, and validation steps.
Long-form thinking on debugging habits, observability, and the systems around the bug.
The Debugging Mindset: A Systematic Method for Finding Root Causes
A repeatable, hypothesis-driven approach to debugging that works for intermittent failures, performance regressions, and production incidents.
Analyzing a Core Dump: What to Do When Your Process Goes Silent
A core dump is your process's last scream. Here's how to make it talk.
Timeouts Every Engineer Gets Wrong (and How to Fix Them)
Most timeout bugs aren't logic errors — they're configuration failures. Here's how to stop treating timeouts as magic numbers and start engineering them deliberately.
Backpressure in Streaming Systems: When Your Pipeline Fights Back
Backpressure is the system's way of saying 'slow down.' Ignore it and you get OOM crashes, silent data loss, or cascading failures. Here's how to design for it.
Finding Memory Leaks Step by Step: A Systematic Approach
Memory leaks are the silent killers of long-running services. Here's a repeatable process to hunt them down, from heap dumps to production monitoring.