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.
Sentry Error Monitoring: A Practical Setup Guide from a Production Outage
A step-by-step setup guide for Sentry error monitoring, covering source maps, release tracking, grouping rules, and alerting — with a real story of a production outage that taught us the hard way.
Reading Prometheus Alert Rules: A Practical Reference for Debugging Firing Alerts
Alert rules look straightforward until you're staring at a firing alert at 3 AM. This post covers the structure, common traps, and how to extract actionable intent from any rule.
Debugging Network Issues with Chrome DevTools: Timing, Waterfalls, and Hidden Columns
A practical guide to diagnosing slow requests, stalled connections, and caching bugs using the Network tab's non-obvious features.
Finding Jank in React Apps with Chrome DevTools Performance Tab
A practical walkthrough of the Performance tab for diagnosing frame drops and long tasks in React apps, with a real debugging story.
Using Breakpoints Effectively: Beyond Step and Continue
Most engineers know F9 to set a breakpoint and F5 to run. But breakpoints have hidden superpowers — conditional, logpoint, hit-count, and data breakpoints — that can cut debugging time in half. Here's how to use them with real examples.
Conditional Breakpoints: When and How to Use Them Beyond the Basics
Conditional breakpoints stop only when a specific condition is true, reducing noise in loops and high-frequency code. Here's how to wield them in Chrome DevTools, VS Code, and IntelliJ, plus a war story about a subtle race condition.