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 Next.js App Router Layout Not Rendering
How to debug and fix the issue where your Next.js App Router layout component fails to render as expected.
Why Your React Error Boundary Isn’t Catching Errors
Pinpoint why your React error boundaries fail to catch component errors, including async mistakes, event handler pitfalls, and rendering issues.
Diagnosing Next.js Custom Webpack Config Failures
Understand and resolve Next.js custom Webpack configuration errors with this focused debugging guide. Fix cryptic build failures and get back to shipping.
Debugging React Lazy: 'Loading Chunk Failed' in Suspense Lazy Components
A real-world, engineer-tested debugging guide for diagnosing and resolving React's 'Loading Chunk Failed' error with lazy-loaded components and Suspense.
Next.js Server Component Incorrectly Using Client Hooks
Diagnose and fix the common pitfall of using React client-only hooks in Next.js server components, including boundary errors and misconfiguration traps.
Zustand Persist Middleware Not Saving or Loading State
How to diagnose and fix persistent state bugs with Zustand's persist middleware in React. Get concrete steps, real root causes, and effective solutions.
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.