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.
Prisma Connection Pool Timeout: Diagnosis and Fixes
A practical guide to diagnosing and fixing Prisma connection pool timeouts in production Node.js apps. Covers under-documented causes like micro-bursts, PgBouncer misconfiguration, and stalled transactions.
Drizzle ORM Migration Not Detecting Schema Changes
A comprehensive guide to debugging Drizzle ORM migrations that fail to detect schema changes, including snapshot mismatches, introspect issues, and push conflicts.
PostgreSQL JSONB Column Query Slow: Diagnosis and Fix
A practical guide to diagnosing and fixing slow queries on JSONB columns in PostgreSQL, covering indexing, query patterns, and common pitfalls.
Postgres Partition Pruning Not Working: A Diagnostic Guide
Diagnose and fix Postgres partition pruning failures. Covers planner limitations, parameterized queries, and partition key type mismatches.
Django Migration Conflict Error: How to Diagnose and Resolve
A practical debugging guide for Django migration conflicts caused by parallel branches, merge order, or circular dependencies.
Debugging Lost Error Context in Go: When %w and errors.Is/As Fail
A guide to debugging Go error wrapping with fmt.Errorf %w when errors.Is/As return false unexpectedly, covering sentinel values, wrapping multiple errors, and nil checks.
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.