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 AWS API Gateway 502 Bad Gateway Errors
A practical guide to diagnosing and fixing 502 Bad Gateway errors from AWS API Gateway, covering common causes like VPC link misconfigurations, integration timeouts, and backend response formatting.
AWS RDS Connection Refused: Security Group Debug Guide
A practical guide to diagnosing and resolving RDS connection refused errors caused by security group misconfigurations, with real commands and war stories.
Custom Metrics Not Appearing in AWS CloudWatch: A Debugging Guide
Diagnose why your custom CloudWatch metrics are not showing up. Covers common causes like namespace mismatch, timestamp issues, and IAM permissions.
Debugging AWS SQS Message Visibility Timeout Causing Duplicate Processing
A practical guide to diagnosing and fixing duplicate message processing caused by visibility timeout misconfiguration in AWS SQS.
AWS CloudFront Serving Stale Content – Debugging Cache Invalidation Failures
A hands-on guide to diagnosing and fixing stale content served by CloudFront when cache invalidations don't work as expected.
Debugging AWS VPC Security Group Traffic Blocked
Step-by-step guide to diagnosing and fixing traffic blocked by AWS security groups. Covers common misconfigurations, hidden gotchas, and verification techniques.
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.