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.
18 playbooks · 509 guides · 96 articles · 13 linked practice labs ·skip to practice
Fast pattern recognition for the production failures engineers see most often.
18 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.
Null Pointer from Kotlin Platform Types in Java Interop
A guide to debugging NullPointerException from platform types when calling Java code from Kotlin. Covers root causes, diagnosis, and fixes.
Android ANR (Application Not Responding) Debugging: From Input Dispatch to Watchdog Timeouts
A field guide for Android engineers on diagnosing and fixing Application Not Responding (ANR) errors, covering input dispatch, broadcast receivers, and service timeouts.
Debugging Excessive Recomposition in Jetpack Compose
A deep dive into identifying and fixing unnecessary recompositions in Jetpack Compose, covering state hoisting, stable types, and common anti-patterns.
Swift Retain Cycles in Closures: How to Find and Fix Them
A guide to diagnosing, fixing, and preventing retain cycles caused by closures in Swift, with real-world debugging steps and a detailed incident story.
SwiftUI View Not Updating When State Changes: A Field Guide
Your SwiftUI view stays stuck even though @State or @Published values change. This guide covers the real reasons—wrong view identity, unnecessary equatable conformance, and publishers on background queues—and how to fix them.
Swift Actor Data Race Concurrency Debugging: Real-World Race Conditions in Actors
A practical guide to debugging data races in Swift actors, covering reentrancy, priority inversion, and actor-isolated state corruption with real crash logs and diagnostic steps.
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.