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.
Spring Security 403 Forbidden Error Debugging
A hands-on guide to diagnosing and fixing 403 Forbidden errors in Spring Security applications, covering hidden causes like annotation misconfigurations and role hierarchy issues.
Spring Boot Application Startup Failure: A Practical Debugging Guide
A concise guide to diagnosing Spring Boot startup failures with concrete commands, logs, and root causes.
Spring JPA LazyInitializationException: Root Causes and Fixes Beyond OpenSessionInView
A practical guide to diagnosing and fixing LazyInitializationException in Spring Data JPA, covering real-world causes like serialization, caching, and transaction boundaries.
Diagnosing and Fixing Java OutOfMemoryError: Java Heap Space
A practical guide to diagnosing Java heap OutOfMemoryError in production, covering non-obvious causes like GC overhead, native memory leaks, and permgen/metaspace issues.
Debugging java.lang.StackOverflowError from Recursion
A practical guide to diagnosing and fixing StackOverflowError caused by unbounded recursion in Java, including thread stack analysis, JVM flags, and code patterns that actually cause this.
Hibernate N+1 Select Problem: Detection, Diagnosis, and Fixes
A hands-on guide to detecting and fixing the Hibernate N+1 query problem with real SQL profiling, lazy loading traps, and JPA fetch strategies.
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.