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.
Postgres ALTER TYPE Enum Migration Fails: Cannot Add New Value Inside a Transaction Block
A guide to debugging and fixing PostgreSQL 'ALTER TYPE ... ADD VALUE' failures during migrations, including transaction block and ordering issues.
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.
How to Debug a Regression: A Practical Walkthrough
A practical, step-by-step guide to finding and fixing regression bugs, with real-world examples and concrete commands you can run today.
The Cost of Not Reproducing Bugs: Why Local Debugging Saves Hours
Skipping local reproduction leads to wasted hours, broken deploys, and frustrated teams. Here's why it's non-negotiable and how to do it right.
Debugging an Unfamiliar Codebase: A Systematic Approach
A repeatable process for debugging code you didn't write — with specific techniques, tooling choices, and a war story from a production outage at 2 AM.
5 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Filing a Bug Report
A senior engineer's pre-flight checklist for bug reports — forged in the fire of a production incident that turned a 5-minute fix into a 3-hour hunt.
Binary Search for Bugs: Cutting Down Bisection Time with git bisect run
Automating git bisect with a script turns days of manual hunting into minutes. Here's how to build a reliable bisection harness for your codebase.
Reading a Call Stack: What Each Frame Actually Tells You
A call stack shows you the path your code took to crash. But most developers only look at the top frame. Here’s how to read the whole thing — including async traces, native frames, and minified code.