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.
Debugging Node.js Cluster Module Worker Crashes
A hands-on guide to diagnosing and fixing worker crashes in Node.js cluster mode, covering uncaught exceptions, memory leaks, and IPC failures.
Debugging TypeScript Generic Type Constraint Errors
A practical guide to diagnosing and fixing TypeScript errors when generic type parameters violate their constraints, with real-world debugging strategies and a war story.
Mapped Types Returning 'never' or 'unknown' — What Your IDE Won't Tell You
A field guide for when mapped types silently collapse to 'never' or 'unknown', covering conditional checks, key remapping, and distributive conditional types.
JavaScript Closure Stale Variable Inside Loop
A debugging guide for the classic JavaScript closure-in-loop bug where callbacks capture the final value of a loop variable instead of each iteration's value.
TypeScript Discriminated Union Type Narrowing Not Working
A practical debugging guide for when TypeScript's discriminated union type narrowing fails due to common pitfalls like excess property checks, optional discriminants, and type assertions.
Debugging Prototype Chain Inheritance Bugs in JavaScript
A guide to diagnosing and fixing subtle bugs caused by shared state and unintended property shadowing in JavaScript prototype chains.
Long-form thinking on debugging habits, observability, and the systems around the bug.
Profiling SQL Queries: Finding and Fixing the Slow 5%
Profiling SQL queries is more than running EXPLAIN. This guide covers practical techniques to find the slowest queries, interpret execution plans, and fix them — with real examples from PostgreSQL and MySQL.
Debugging Character Encoding Problems: From Gibberish to Unicode
A practical guide to identifying and fixing character encoding problems, from broken UTF-8 to hidden BOM bytes, with real debugging examples.
Debugging Timezone Date Bugs: A Case Study in UTC vs. Local Time
A practical walkthrough of a timestamp bug that broke a billing system, with reproducible code and debugging tactics.
Floating Point Arithmetic Errors: A Debugging Postmortem
How a $0.0000000000000004 error silently corrupted a financial system, and the debugging techniques that caught it.
Why JSON.parse() Throws and How to Catch It: A Field Guide to Parsing Failures
JSON.parse() seems simple until it throws. Here's a practical guide to the most common — and most maddening — parsing failures I've encountered, with exact error messages and fixes.
Debugging Third-Party API Issues: A Systematic Approach
A practical guide to diagnosing and fixing third-party API integration problems, with real-world examples and a step-by-step debugging framework.