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.
Kubernetes Pod DNS Resolution Failure: Debugging Steps & Fixes
A practical guide to diagnosing and fixing DNS resolution failures in Kubernetes pods, covering cluster DNS, CoreDNS, and network policies.
Debugging Kubernetes Resource Quota Exceeded
A practical guide for diagnosing and fixing Kubernetes resource quota exceeded errors, covering common causes and verification steps.
Debugging Kubernetes Init Containers That Never Complete
A field-tested guide to diagnosing and fixing init containers that hang, crash, or silently fail in Kubernetes.
Debugging Missing Artifacts in Docker Multi-Stage Builds
When a Docker multi-stage build produces a smaller final image but the expected binary or file is not present, the cause is often a copy-from mistake or builder stage mislabeling.
Docker Build Cache Invalidation: Why Your Builds Are Slow
A practical guide to debugging slow Docker builds caused by cache invalidation. Covers common pitfalls like COPY order, build args, and layer reuse.
Docker Permission Denied When Running a Container
A step-by-step guide to diagnosing and fixing 'permission denied' errors when executing docker run, including file permissions, user namespaces, and SELinux.
Long-form thinking on debugging habits, observability, and the systems around the bug.
Debugging Production Issues Without a Debugger: Approaches That Work
Attaching an interactive debugger in production is usually impossible. Here’s how I gather signal, reproduce issues, and restore service using other techniques.
Writing Bug Reports That Developers Appreciate
A good bug report is more than a template. Learn which details actually move the needle, and which common 'best practices' waste developer time.
Assert Statements: Where They Help and Where They Hurt
Assert statements are a double-edged sword. Used correctly, they catch bugs early and document invariants. Used carelessly, they can mask failures and create security holes. Here's how to wield them effectively.
Defensive Logging: Patterns for Surviving Production Data Rot
Most logging advice stops at 'log more'. Here's how to log defensively—handling nulls, encoding, PII, and context propagation before they rot your observability pipeline.
Debuggers vs Console.log: Why I Stopped Using Print Statements for Debugging
Print statements are the duct tape of debugging. They work for trivial issues, but for race conditions, async flows, or deep call stacks, a debugger saves hours. Here's what I learned after years of using both.
Treating Bugs as Hypotheses: How the Scientific Method Fixes Debugging
Frustrated by flailing through logs? The scientific method turns debugging into a reproducible process. Here's how to formulate hypotheses, design experiments, and isolate root causes with confidence.