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 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.