Hatch
Lag against the cutover
A vertical rule for the promised hour. A horizontal strip for duration. Hatching begins where the strip crosses the rule. No hatch means the feed finished in time, even if it felt slow.
The atlas
Marks we use for lag, backlog, and broken handoffs
This atlas is not decoration. It is the small language we use on every pipeline health review, recap sheet, and wall chart so a night operator who saw last month’s folio can read this month’s without a new legend.
We keep the marks few on purpose. A sheet that needs a booklet is a sheet that failed in the doorway. If a crew already has a pencil code that works, we will adopt it rather than fight it — after we are sure two people in the room mean the same thing by the same stroke.
Ask us to mark your feeds when you can name the family and the hour it must clear. The atlas does not travel without that hour.
Stain
Backlog that did not clear
A darker stain where records waited past the window. Depth follows how many cycles the pile survived, not how angry the morning was.
Cluster
Retries in a knot
Dots gather where the same batch came back. A knot at 02:00 next to a named source is a story. A scatter of single retries is weather.
Pile
Dead letters by cause
Three stains, never one: wrong shape, double arrival, missing handoff. Mixing them hides the decision that grew the pile.
Clock
Freshness versus completeness
Two faces. One sits on the cutover hour. The other sits on counts and on the pile. A healthy timetable can still hide Tuesday’s missing orders.
Break
A handoff that leaks
A short ruled gap between two systems, annotated where keys vanish, double, or arrive wearing yesterday’s names. The gap is the subject, not the systems on either side.