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.
GitHub Actions Secret Not Available in Fork: The Inherent Trust Boundary
When a forked PR fails because secrets are missing, it's not a bug—it's an intentional security boundary. This guide shows how to detect, work around, and verify the issue.
Debugging GitHub Actions Cache Restore Miss: Why Your Actions Aren't Finding Cache
A practical guide to diagnosing and fixing cache restore misses in GitHub Actions workflows, covering key collisions, exact key matching, and non-obvious causes like branch scoping.
GitLab CI Pipeline Stuck in Pending: Debugging Runner Availability and Tag Mismatches
Diagnose why your GitLab CI pipeline stays pending. Covers runner registration, tag mismatches, concurrency limits, and queue backlogs.
Debugging Jenkins Pipeline Build Failures That Don't Show in Console Output
A practical guide to debugging Jenkins pipeline build failures that fail silently, with no obvious errors in the console log.
Pre-Commit Hook Failing: Debugging and Fixing Hook Execution Errors
A practical guide to diagnosing and resolving pre-commit hook failures in Git repositories, covering configuration, environment, and script issues.
Turborepo Cache Not Hitting – Debugging Remote and Local Cache Misses
A practical guide to diagnosing why Turborepo's cache is not hitting, covering both local and remote cache misses with concrete commands and root causes.
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.