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.
Prometheus Alert Not Firing: A Systematic Debugging Guide
A structured approach to diagnosing why a Prometheus alert rule isn't triggering, covering expression evaluation, staleness, relabeling, and configuration pitfalls.
Sentry Not Capturing Errors: A Debugging Guide
A direct guide to diagnosing why Sentry fails to capture errors in production, covering SDK misconfigurations, network issues, and rate limits.
Distributed Tracing Spans Not Connecting: A Debugging Guide
Guide to debugging missing parent-child connections in distributed traces, covering sampling mismatches, header propagation failures, and clock skew.
Correlation ID Not Propagating Across Asynchronous Boundaries
Debug why your distributed logging correlation ID disappears across async boundaries, thread pools, or event buses — with concrete commands and fix patterns.
CDN Cache Not Invalidating After Deploy – Debugging Stale Assets
A practical guide to diagnosing and fixing CDN cache invalidation failures after deployments, covering common misconfigurations, header issues, and verification steps.
HTTP ETag and Cache-Control Not Caching: Why Browsers Ignore Your Headers
A practical guide to debugging HTTP caching failures when ETag and Cache-Control headers are present but browsers or proxies refuse to cache responses.
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.