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.
ECS Task Definition Error: Why Your Container Won't Start
A focused guide for diagnosing ECS tasks stuck in provisioning or stop due to definition errors—image pull failures, IAM role misconfig, and resource limits.
AWS Secrets Manager Secret Retrieval Failing: Debug Guide
A practical guide to debugging 'AccessDeniedException' and 'ResourceNotFoundException' when retrieving secrets from AWS Secrets Manager.
AWS Cognito User Pool Authentication Error Debugging
A practical guide to diagnosing and fixing authentication errors in AWS Cognito User Pools, covering common misconfigurations, token issues, and SDK pitfalls.
AWS EventBridge Rule Not Triggering: Debugging Guide
A practical guide to diagnosing why an EventBridge rule isn't firing, covering event pattern mismatches, IAM misconfigurations, and throttling.
GCP Cloud Run Container Startup Timeout Debugging Guide
A practical guide to diagnosing and fixing container startup timeouts in Google Cloud Run, covering resource limits, health checks, and cold start optimization.
GCP Firestore Query Needs Index: Diagnosing and Fixing the Missing Index Error
A focused guide to diagnosing and fixing the 'index required' error in Google Cloud Firestore queries. Covers composite index creation, query structure pitfalls, and debugging with real examples.
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.