jacob-balslev Event Contract Design
Concept of the skill
Use when designing or reviewing asynchronous event contracts: producer/consumer ownership, event envelope, schema, topic/channel naming, ordering, idempotency, versioning, compatibility, replay, dead-letter behavior, and AsyncAPI/CloudEvents-style documentation.
Coverage
Design asynchronous event contracts for producers and consumers. Covers event envelope, schema, event type, topic/channel naming, producer ownership, consumer expectations, required and optional fields, idempotency keys, ordering, causation and correlation IDs, schema evolution, replay, dead-letter behavior, compatibility, observability, and machine-readable documentation such as AsyncAPI or CloudEvents-style metadata.
Philosophy of the skill
An event is a public promise once another consumer depends on it. If the payload, ordering, retry, or compatibility rules are implicit, every consumer invents its own interpretation and the event stream becomes shared folklore.
Do not confuse event discovery with event contracts. Discovery asks what happened in the domain. Contract design asks what exactly will be published, consumed, replayed, and evolved.
Method
- Name the producer, owner, intended consumers, and event purpose.
- Separate business event type from transport topic or queue name.
- Define envelope fields: id, type, source, time, subject, schema version, correlation, causation, tenant, and idempotency key.
- Define payload schema with required, optional, nullable, and deprecated fields.
- State ordering, delivery, retry, replay, and dead-letter expectations.
- Define compatibility rules: additive fields, breaking changes, versioning, deprecation, and consumer migration.
- Add observability fields needed to reconstruct publishing and consumption failures.
- Provide at least one positive and one negative contract fixture.
Evals
This skill ships a comprehension-eval artifact at examples/evals/event-contract-design.json. The checklist below is the authoring gate for async event contracts; the eval file is the grader surface.
Verification
- Producer, owner, and consumers are named
- Event type, topic/channel, envelope, and payload are distinct
- Required, optional, nullable, and deprecated fields are explicit
- Idempotency, ordering, retry, replay, and dead-letter behavior are stated
- Compatibility rules distinguish additive from breaking changes
- Correlation and causation IDs cross async boundaries
- Positive and negative fixtures exist for contract testing
Do NOT Use When
| Use instead | When |
|---|---|
event-storming |
You are still discovering domain events, commands, policies, aggregates, or timelines. |
system-interface-contracts |
The boundary is not specifically asynchronous events or messages. |
webhook-integration |
You are implementing inbound provider webhooks, signatures, retries, and raw payload handling. |
api-design |
You are designing HTTP endpoints, status codes, pagination, filtering, or error envelopes. |
observability-modeling |
The event contract is settled and the task is telemetry design. |
Skill Graph context
Classification
- Subject:
software-architecture - Public:
true - Domain:
architecture/events - Scope: Use when designing or reviewing asynchronous event contracts: producer/consumer ownership, event envelope, schema, topic/channel naming, ordering, idempotency, versioning, compatibility, replay, dead-letter behavior, and AsyncAPI/CloudEvents-style documentation. Do NOT use for domain-event discovery (use
event-storming), broad interface contracts (usesystem-interface-contracts), inbound provider webhook mechanics (usewebhook-integration), or HTTP endpoint design (useapi-design).
When to use
- design the event contract for publishing OrderPaid to downstream consumers
- define topic names, payload schema, idempotency, and versioning for this event stream
- review this outbound webhook event schema before customers integrate with it
- write the compatibility rules for consumers of these async messages
Not for
- discover the domain events, commands, and policies in this business process
- define every boundary contract between services, jobs, and APIs
- verify inbound provider webhook signatures and retry behavior
- design REST endpoints, status codes, and pagination
Related skills
- Verify with:
system-interface-contracts,observability-modeling,real-time-updates - Related:
api-design,state-machine-modeling,entity-relationship-modeling,event-storming,system-interface-contracts,observability-modeling,webhook-integration
Keywords
event-contract,async-api,cloudevents,event envelope,topic naming,async event schema,event compatibility,replay contract,dead-letter behavior,consumer fixtures