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.
Kubernetes pod CrashLoopBackOff: how to debug crashing pods
Your pod starts, crashes, restarts, crashes again. The CrashLoopBackOff status means Kubernetes is giving up. The pod logs hold the answer.
SSL certificate error after deployment: how to debug TLS issues
Your site was working with HTTPS. After a deployment, browsers show SSL errors. The certificate expired, was not renewed, or the domain changed.
Frontend build works locally but fails on Vercel or Render: how to debug it
Your build command succeeds locally but fails when Vercel or Render runs it. The platform has a different Node version, memory limit, or build settings.
API timeout: how to debug request timeout issues
Your API endpoint returns a timeout error. The request takes longer than the configured timeout, but the operation might have succeeded silently on the server.
Duplicate emails sent by retry bug: how to debug it
Your email service retries a failed send, but the first send actually succeeded. Users get two, three, or ten copies of the same email.
Pagination off by one bug: how to debug pagination errors
Your paginated list skips the first item, shows the last item twice, or has an empty last page. The offset, limit, or page calculation is off by one.
Long-form thinking on debugging habits, observability, and the systems around the bug.
Five Debugging Habits That Separate Seniors from Juniors
It's not tools. It's not years of experience. It's five repeatable habits that senior engineers do reflexively and juniors haven't built yet.
Why Your Production Logs Are Lying to You
Logs tell you what the code reported. They almost never tell you what actually happened. Here is the gap, and how to close it.
The Real Cost of Console.log Debugging (and What to Use Instead)
Every engineer reaches for console.log. Most do not think about what it costs — in time, in performance, or in production readiness. Here is the honest accounting.
Interpreting Stack Traces: Practical Steps for Faster Debugging
Stack traces can be dense, but reading them fluently accelerates triage and root cause analysis. This article explains how to extract actionable information, with real-world context.
Efficient Debugging with git bisect: Going Beyond Binary Search
This article explains how to incorporate git bisect into your debugging workflow, focusing on practical execution, automation, and common edge cases.
Applying Rubber Duck Debugging to Complex Engineering Problems
Rubber duck debugging isn’t just a quirky solo exercise. I’ll show how explaining code out loud surfaces misunderstandings and reduces wasted team cycles.