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.
18 playbooks · 509 guides · 96 articles · 13 linked practice labs ·skip to practice
Fast pattern recognition for the production failures engineers see most often.
18 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.
Null Pointer from Kotlin Platform Types in Java Interop
A guide to debugging NullPointerException from platform types when calling Java code from Kotlin. Covers root causes, diagnosis, and fixes.
Android ANR (Application Not Responding) Debugging: From Input Dispatch to Watchdog Timeouts
A field guide for Android engineers on diagnosing and fixing Application Not Responding (ANR) errors, covering input dispatch, broadcast receivers, and service timeouts.
Debugging Excessive Recomposition in Jetpack Compose
A deep dive into identifying and fixing unnecessary recompositions in Jetpack Compose, covering state hoisting, stable types, and common anti-patterns.
Swift Retain Cycles in Closures: How to Find and Fix Them
A guide to diagnosing, fixing, and preventing retain cycles caused by closures in Swift, with real-world debugging steps and a detailed incident story.
SwiftUI View Not Updating When State Changes: A Field Guide
Your SwiftUI view stays stuck even though @State or @Published values change. This guide covers the real reasons—wrong view identity, unnecessary equatable conformance, and publishers on background queues—and how to fix them.
Swift Actor Data Race Concurrency Debugging: Real-World Race Conditions in Actors
A practical guide to debugging data races in Swift actors, covering reentrancy, priority inversion, and actor-isolated state corruption with real crash logs and diagnostic steps.
Long-form thinking on debugging habits, observability, and the systems around the bug.
Tracking Down a 200 MB Leak with Python Memory Profilers
A production API was silently leaking 200 MB of RAM every hour. Here's how memory profilers found the culprit—a forgotten NumPy array reference—and how you can apply the same techniques.
Reading CPU Flame Graphs: What the Hot Colors Actually Tell You
Flame graphs are everywhere, but most engineers read them wrong. Here's how to identify real bottlenecks, avoid common misinterpretations, and turn profile data into actionable fixes.
When Logs Lie: The Gaps Between What You Log and What Actually Happened
Logs are the first thing we reach for during an incident. But they can be misleading, incomplete, or outright wrong. Here's when to trust them and when not to.
Adding Observability to a 500K-Line Monolith Without a Rewrite
Adding structured logging, distributed tracing, and metrics to a legacy monolith without a full rewrite. Real code examples and a war story from a 500K-line codebase.
Distributed Tracing: Following a Single Request Across Microservices
Distributed tracing lets you follow a request as it hops across services. I'll show you how trace context propagates, why sampling matters, and how tracing helped us debug a 5-second latency spike in production.
Structured Logging in JSON: Fields, Schemas, and Pitfalls from Production
A practical guide to designing JSON log schemas that are queryable, consistent, and actually useful in production — with field recommendations and a war story.