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.
3 playbooks in Backend & APIs
Debugging Retry Bugs
Retry issues often hide the first failure and create duplicate work.
Debugging Idempotency Bugs
How to debug duplicate writes when clients, webhooks, or workers retry after ambiguous failures.
Debugging Payment Races
How to reason about duplicate charges, concurrent refunds, and payment workflow compensation.
Structured investigations for the failure modes engineers meet in real systems.
Java Kafka Consumer Not Receiving Messages
A step-by-step debugging guide for when your Java Kafka consumer stops receiving messages: root causes, diagnostic commands, and fix patterns.
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.
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.
Debugging HTTP 429 Too Many Requests – API Rate Limit Guide
A hands-on guide to diagnosing, mitigating, and preventing HTTP 429 rate limit errors with specific tools and patterns.
WebSocket Connection Closing Unexpectedly: A Field Guide
A systematic approach to diagnosing why WebSocket connections drop, covering proxy timeouts, idle timeouts, load balancer quirks, and client-side keepalive failures.
Debugging gRPC Status Code Errors: Root Causes and Fixes
A practical guide to debugging gRPC status code errors, covering non-obvious causes like proxy interference, deadline propagation, and client/server version mismatches.
Long-form thinking on debugging habits, observability, and the systems around the bug.
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.
Debugging Webhook Delivery Failures: What the Logs Don't Tell You
HTTP 200 doesn't mean your webhook was processed. A practical guide to the network and middleware layers that silently drop webhooks.
Debugging HTTP Headers with curl: From Basic Flags to Packet-Level Inspection
A practical guide to inspecting HTTP request and response headers with curl, covering basic flags, debugging tricky issues, and understanding what your headers are really doing.
Debugging WebSocket Real-Time Features: Packet Loss, Reconnect Storms, and Silent Failures
WebSocket debugging goes beyond console.log. I cover packet capture with tcpdump, reconnect backoff strategies, and a war story about a silent failure that took down a production chat feature.
Rest API Design Mistakes That Inject Bugs Into Your System
Most API bugs aren't in the implementation—they're baked into the contract. Here are the design errors I've seen cause the most production incidents.
Idempotency Keys: The Safety Net Your Payment API Needs
How idempotency keys prevent double charges, lost refunds, and data corruption in payment APIs. With real-world examples and edge cases you haven't considered.