Platform
Platform Contracts
Jonah Park
Platform
Platform Contracts
APIs that survive their authors
Jonah Park
A monograph on the only durable artifact a platform team produces: the contract. Versioning, deprecation, error grammars, and the social work of keeping a surface stable while the models underneath churn.
12 pages345 words$16
Opening
The surface is the product
A platform is not a cluster. It is a promise about a surface. The cluster can be replaced; the promise cannot, not without a migration that will take a year and a friendship.
When I join a platform team I ask to see the public types, the error codes, and the deprecation policy. If those are missing, there is no platform, only a set of helpful people. Helpful people do not scale. Contracts do.