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.
Docker Volume Mount Not Showing Files: A Practical Debugging Guide
A hands-on guide to diagnosing Docker volume mounts that appear empty or fail to sync files, with real commands and common pitfalls.
Docker Healthcheck Always Failing: Diagnosis and Fixes
A practical guide to debugging Docker healthchecks that constantly fail. Covers common pitfalls like CMD syntax, exit codes, timing, and network dependencies.
Docker Compose depends_on Not Waiting – Why Your App Starts Before the Database Is Ready
Docker Compose's depends_on only waits for container start, not service readiness. This guide explains the difference and how to fix it with healthchecks and wait scripts.
Docker Compose Services Cannot Reach Each Other: A Debugging Guide
A practical guide to diagnosing and fixing network connectivity issues between services in Docker Compose, covering common misconfigurations and debugging commands.
Helm Chart Release Failed: Debugging Tillerless Deployments
A definitive guide to debugging failed Helm releases in Tillerless environments (Helm 3). Covers dry-run mismatches, hook failures, and resource conflicts.
Kubernetes Job Hangs: Debugging Pods That Never Complete
A Kubernetes Job pod stuck in Running or Pending state despite the container process appearing idle. Diagnose and fix common causes like missing termination, resource deadlocks, and probe misconfigurations.
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.