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.
Jest Fake Timers Not Working: A Debugging Guide
A practical guide to debugging when Jest's fake timers (jest.useFakeTimers) don't behave as expected—covering async race conditions, timer scope, and common pitfalls.
Thread Pool Starvation Deadlock: How to Detect, Diagnose, and Fix It
Learn how to identify and resolve thread pool starvation deadlocks where waiting tasks block worker threads, causing cascading failures.
GC Thrashing Causes High CPU — How to Diagnose and Stop It
A practical guide to identifying and resolving garbage collection thrashing that spikes CPU usage in JVM and .NET applications.
Debugging Pandas Merge Producing Duplicate Rows
A targeted guide for diagnosing and fixing unexpected row explosions when merging DataFrames, covering key mismatches, duplicate keys, and index bleed.
Pandas SettingWithCopyWarning: How to Find and Fix the Real Source
A practical guide to eliminating SettingWithCopyWarning in pandas by understanding chain indexing, copy vs. view semantics, and using .loc and .copy() correctly.
RabbitMQ Connection Churn Spiking CPU: Debugging Guide
When clients rapidly open/close connections, RabbitMQ's Erlang VM burns CPU managing channel and process overhead. This guide covers the real causes, from client misconfigurations to rogue heartbeat timeouts.
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.