Architecture Notes — Recursion Lab

Architecture Notes — Recursion Lab

This file distills a short Architect Guide for module authors who want to design and manage whole projects.

Principles

• Encapsulate intent: module boundaries should reflect responsibilities and invariants, not only file layout.
• Standardize interfaces: use explicit, stable contracts (schemas or API specs).
• Observability from the start: logs, traces, and metrics make integration problems visible.
• Design for graceful failure: define how modules degrade and recover.
• Evolve safely: version contracts and provide deprecation paths.

Quick checklist

• One-line ownership for each module (who owns what).
• Explicit contract for each integration (inputs, outputs, errors).
• Failure modes documented and practiced.
• Integration tests in CI (contract tests and a small end-to-end smoke test).
• Observability: structured logs + a couple of business metrics for key flows.

Mini example (blog)

• Content API owns canonical content and emits content.updated events.
• Admin UI talks to Content API synchronously for editing flows.
• Search service subscribes to events to index content asynchronously.
• CDN serves static builds; preview mode reads content directly for staging.

Practical next steps (minimal edits you can do now)

• Add one-sentence ownership lines to module READMEs.
• Add a contract checklist entry to PR templates (if you have them).
• Ensure CI runs the Jekyll build (already present) and add a smoke test for a public route.

If you want, I can convert this into a more detailed ARCHITECTURE.md with diagrams, or add a small PR template and a README checklist. For now this is kept minimal so you can add your content later.