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.
Kubernetes ConfigMap Not Mounting as Volume – Debugging Guide
A practical guide to diagnose and fix ConfigMap volumes that fail to mount in Kubernetes pods, covering common misconfigurations and hidden gotchas.
Kubernetes PersistentVolumeClaim Stuck in Pending: Debugging Guide
A practical guide to debugging a PersistentVolumeClaim stuck in Pending state in Kubernetes, covering storage class misconfiguration, missing provisioner, and capacity issues.
Kubernetes RBAC 403 Forbidden: Debugging Authorization Denials
A practical guide to diagnosing and fixing Kubernetes RBAC 403 Forbidden errors, covering common causes, diagnosis steps, and fixes with real-world examples.
Kubernetes Ingress Not Routing Traffic: A Debugging Guide
A concrete debugging guide for when your Kubernetes Ingress controller stops routing traffic to services, covering diagnosis, common causes, and fixes.
Kubernetes HPA Not Scaling: Diagnosing and Fixing Stuck Autoscalers
A practical guide to debugging Horizontal Pod Autoscalers that refuse to scale, covering metrics pipeline issues, target utilization mismatch, and custom metrics pitfalls.
Kubernetes Node Not Ready: Beyond the Textbook
A practical guide to debugging Kubernetes nodes stuck in NotReady state, covering kubelet, CNI, disk pressure, and real-world edge cases.
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.