Concepts
Designing Interface Boundaries That Don’t Surprise Ops
A practical walkthrough of contracts, failure modes, and receipts.
An interface is the boundary where two systems meet—a contract that defines how they communicate, what they expect, and how they handle failure. Interface design is the practice of shaping these boundaries to be explicit, safe, and easy to reason about. It's not just about user interfaces; it's about any interaction point between components, services, or teams.
Good interface design reduces coordination cost, makes failure modes explicit, and enables operations teams to safely retry and recover. It's the difference between integrations that quietly break and systems that fail loudly and recover gracefully.
Recognize an interface design problem by its downstream symptoms.
A practical walkthrough of contracts, failure modes, and receipts.
Patterns for retries, receipts, and durable state references.
Common smells, how to surface them, and reduce coordination cost.
Interface-first page framework used to make contracts explicit.
A mission focused on shaping boundaries and failure modes.