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.
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Structured investigations for the failure modes engineers meet in real systems.
Diagnosing and Resolving Next.js Server Action Errors
Pinpoint and fix errors in Next.js server actions, focusing on non-obvious causes like serialization and environment mismatches.
React Custom Hook Stale Closure State Bugs
Advanced guide to debugging and fixing stale closure issues in React custom hooks, with real stack traces, code examples, and actionable steps.
Diagnosing Next.js Dynamic Import SSR Failures
Resolve Next.js SSR crashes caused by dynamic imports. Understand misconfigurations, hydrate mismatches, and JavaScript execution pitfalls in server contexts.
Debugging Next.js Streaming SSR: Stuck, Broken, or Incomplete Streams
Identify and resolve non-obvious Next.js streaming SSR bugs: hung responses, incomplete HTML, or silent server errors. Includes war stories and concrete tactics.
Diagnosing React's Controlled vs. Uncontrolled Component Warning
How to debug and resolve React's controlled/uncontrolled component warning, why it happens, and what to check when your inputs act weird.
next.js revalidatePath Not Refreshing Cache on Dynamic Routes
next.js revalidatePath sometimes fails to refresh cache, especially on dynamic routes. This guide covers real causes, debugging, and practical fixes.
Long-form thinking on debugging habits, observability, and the systems around the bug.
When to Escalate a Bug: A Decision Framework for Junior and Mid-Level Engineers
A practical framework for junior and mid-level engineers to decide when to escalate a bug, with real-world examples and criteria beyond time spent.
Debugging vs. Firefighting: Why Treating Production Incidents as Debugging Sessions Fails
When production goes down, your brain wants to debug. That instinct costs you hours. Here's why firefighting requires a fundamentally different approach, and the specific process I use to switch modes.
Writing an Incident Runbook That Actually Gets Used in Production
A runbook isn't a document—it's a tool. Here's how to write one that reduces MTTR and doesn't embarrass you during the next PagerDuty alert.
Debugging a production incident with your boss on Slack: staying rational when everything is on fire
A personal account of debugging a cascading Redis failure while the VP of Engineering watched, and the mental models that kept the fix from turning into a rollback.
Print Debugging vs Debugger: When printf Wins and When It Fails
Printf debugging is dismissed as primitive, but in many real-world scenarios it's faster and more reliable than a full debugger. Here's the tradeoff with concrete examples from distributed systems and production incidents.
Writing Postmortems That Actually Improve Reliability
A postmortem that blames someone gets filed and forgotten. A postmortem that traces cause without blame becomes a reliability upgrade. Here's how to write the second kind, with a real example from an 18-hour DNS outage.