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.
FastAPI Dependency Injection Fails: Missing `async def` and Scope Mismatches
A practical guide to debugging FastAPI dependency injection errors caused by missing async def, incorrect scope, or parameter mismatches.
Django Celery Task Not Executing: A Field Guide to Silent Failures
Diagnose why your Celery task won't run in Django — from broker misconfigurations to worker crashes. Commands, logs, and fixes included.
Debugging FastAPI 422 Validation Errors: Pydantic Model Mismatches
A systematic approach to diagnosing and fixing HTTP 422 validation errors in FastAPI, focusing on Pydantic model mismatches and request parsing issues.
FastAPI Background Task Not Running: Debugging Silent Failures
A practical debugging guide for when FastAPI background tasks silently fail to execute, covering lifespan events, async context, and server configuration.
Debugging FastAPI CORS Errors from Frontend Requests
A practical guide to diagnosing and fixing CORS errors when a frontend makes requests to a FastAPI backend.
Python Multiprocessing PicklingError: How to Debug
A practical guide to diagnosing and fixing PicklingError when using Python's multiprocessing module. Covers pickling scope issues, lambda closures, and dynamic classes.
Long-form thinking on debugging habits, observability, and the systems around the bug.
Mocking External APIs in Tests: Why stubbing HTTP is harder than it looks
Stubbing HTTP calls seems easy until a subtle mismatch between your mock and the real API causes a production incident. Here's what I learned the hard way.
How I Diagnosed a 1-in-1000 Race Condition in Our CI Pipeline
A race condition that only appeared once every thousand CI runs took weeks to track down. Here's how we finally caught it, what tools helped, and what we changed to prevent similar bugs.
How Database Indexes Work: A Debugging Story
A practical guide to understanding database indexes through the lens of debugging a real production outage caused by a missing covering index.
Reading PostgreSQL EXPLAIN ANALYZE Output: A Practical Guide with Real Query Examples
EXPLAIN ANALYZE is the single most important tool for diagnosing slow queries. Here's how to read the output, spot common pitfalls, and fix them with real-world examples.
When caches lie: debugging stale data in distributed systems
Cache invalidation is often cited as one of the two hard problems in CS, but the daily reality is subtler: partial staleness, clock drift, and silent evictions. This post walks through real debugging techniques for stale data in Redis, Memcached, and CDN layers.
Debugging Cache Invalidation Failures: A Case Study with Redis and PostgreSQL
Cache invalidation sounds simple — write-through, TTLs, done. But in practice, silent failures hide in race conditions, connection pools, and stale read replicas. Here's a real debugging story with Redis and PostgreSQL that taught me how to find them.