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.
ESLint Rule Conflict: How to Diagnose and Fix Competing Linter Directives
A complete guide to resolving ESLint rule conflicts where two or more rules produce contradictory outcomes, breaking your lint pipeline or CI.
Nx Affected Command Not Detecting Changes: Debugging Guide
When `nx affected` commands fail to see your changes, the cause is almost always a mismatch between the git base and the project graph. This guide shows you exactly how to diagnose and fix it.
ArgoCD Application Sync Failed: A Hands-On Debugging Guide
A practical guide to diagnosing and fixing ArgoCD application sync failures, covering common root causes like out-of-cluster state, resource conflicts, and network issues.
semantic-release Not Creating a Release: Debugging the Silent Fail
A practical guide to debugging why semantic-release runs without errors but produces no release. Covers token issues, commit message parsing, and GitHub branch protection.
Husky Git Hook Not Running: Why Your Pre-commit or Commit-msg Hook is Silently Skipped
Diagnose why Husky hooks are not executing despite being installed. Covers .git/hooks issues, path problems, and permission errors.
How to Debug SSL Certificate Errors: Self-Signed Certificates in HTTPS
A practical guide to debugging 'self-signed certificate' errors in HTTPS connections, covering diagnosis, root causes, and fixes for intermediate engineers.
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.