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.
Configuration Options Not Binding in .NET: How to Debug
A practical guide to debugging .NET configuration binding failures, covering real-world causes like casing mismatches, missing sections, and premature validation.
Elixir GenServer call timeout: How to find and fix the real cause
A hands-on guide for debugging Elixir GenServer call timeouts: from symptoms and root causes to specific fixes and verification steps, with a real incident walkthrough.
Phoenix LiveView assign not updating UI: Debugging Stale State
A practical guide to debugging Phoenix LiveView UI that doesn't update after an assign change. Covers socket diffs, Ecto schema reloads, and dead-end pitfalls.
Debugging Ecto N+1 Preload Queries in Elixir
Identify and fix N+1 query problems caused by Ecto preload misuse in Elixir/Phoenix applications.
Elixir Process Mailbox Overflow: How to Diagnose and Fix Unbounded Message Accumulation
Diagnose and fix Elixir process mailbox growth that causes memory pressure, latency spikes, and crashes. Covers OTP mailbox internals, redbug, recon, and practical fixes.
Kotlin Coroutine Not Cancelling: Debugging Stuck Jobs
A practical guide to debugging Kotlin coroutines that ignore cancellation, covering common pitfalls like blocking calls, uncooperative suspend functions, and improper scope management.
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.