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.
Flutter FutureBuilder Rebuilds Infinitely: The Real Causes and Fixes
A practical guide to stopping FutureBuilder from rebuilding endlessly in Flutter, with root causes, diagnosis steps, and real war stories.
Debugging PyTorch Tensor Shape Mismatch Runtime Errors
A practical guide to diagnosing and resolving shape mismatch errors in PyTorch, covering common causes, debugging commands, and fixes.
PyTorch Gradient Explosion Producing NaN Loss
Diagnose and fix NaN losses caused by gradient explosion in PyTorch models. Covers gradient clipping, weight initialization, and data normalization.
TensorFlow Incompatible Shapes Error: Debugging Shape Mismatch in Production
A practical guide to diagnosing and fixing TensorFlow shape mismatches, from understanding error messages to verifying the fix.
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.