The Problem Wasn’t the System - It Was the Boundary Between Them
There was a time when I kept looking for the broken component. If something failed, I assumed something was down. But one production issue changed that assumption. Everything was working. The node was healthy. The RPC was responding. The indexer was processing data. And yet, the system wasn’t behaving correctly. The issue was between systems It wasn’t inside any one component. It was in how they interacted. The RPC response timing didn’t match what the indexer expected. The indexer lag created inconsistencies in downstream APIs. No system was technically “failing.” But the user experience was. Why this changed how I debug Before this, I focused on components. After this, I started focusing on boundaries. What does this system expect? What does it guarantee? What happens when it partially fails? These questions mattered more than logs inside a single service. Production is about interactions The more systems you add, the more boundaries you create. And most pr...