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.
PostgreSQL Full-Text Search Returns No Results
Debug why PostgreSQL full-text search returns empty results despite seemingly correct queries and indexes. Covers tsvector/tsquery mismatches, configuration issues, and silent failures.
PostgreSQL Replication Lag Too High – Diagnosis and Fixes
A practical guide to diagnosing and fixing high replication lag in PostgreSQL. Covers common causes like wal_keep_segments, network bottlenecks, and standby query conflicts.
PostgreSQL Table Bloat: When VACUUM Stops Working
A deep-dive into PostgreSQL table bloat caused by VACUUM failing to reclaim space due to long-running transactions, replication slots, or dead tuple accumulation.
PostgreSQL ALTER TYPE ADD VALUE Transaction Errors
Version-aware fixes for PostgreSQL ALTER TYPE ADD VALUE failures and for enum values that cannot be used until the surrounding transaction commits.
Postgres CTE Performance: Why Your Query Suddenly Slowed Down
A practical guide to diagnosing and fixing performance issues with PostgreSQL Common Table Expressions (CTEs), focusing on the optimizer fence problem and materialization.
Postgres Trigger Not Firing: Debugging Silent Failures
A systematic approach to debug Postgres triggers that don't execute, covering common pitfalls like statement-level vs row-level, trigger visibility, and silent errors.
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.