Photon, May 2026
Cosmos, the infra
The machine room behind Photon’s Mac fleet.
Cosmos is the internal platform that keeps Photon’s fleet of physical Mac devices enrolled, monitored, and ready to serve. I designed and built it end to end, API and dashboard, 250+ commits. The part I care most about is the interface.
An ops tool earns trust in its details: whether a glance tells you what’s actually broken, whether a color means the same thing in every corner of the app, whether a timestamp can be believed from another timezone. The work below is that layer.
Craft
A piece of it, rebuilt for this page. The dashboard’s 30-day uptime bar: days sharing a status fuse into one capsule, and a single detail panel glides across the bar as you hover, re-anchoring to the day under the cursor instead of closing and reopening. Try it.
The UptimeHistory block as it ships in a Mac instance’s History tab, with the original’s interaction logic: run-fusing, hover-close grace, and Statuspage-style verdict bands. The real one also pins on click and lists outages by period or by service.
The full pill enum, staged the way the Cosmos design-system page stages it: Free and Allocated on the neutral and info ladders, a manual-override variant, Shared in lavender; then the combined verdicts a pill shows when the line is unhealthy. One reserved border means states swap without a pixel of layout shift.
Color as grammar
Every hue has exactly one job. Green, amber, and red are verdicts; they belong to health alone. Allocation is utilization, not a judgment, so an in-use line wears informational blue and a shared one lavender; a busy fleet doesn't get to look like a healthy one. And when a machine is down, its pill shows the verdict instead of the allocation. There is no point advertising “Allocated” on a Mac that isn't there.
One panel, gliding
The uptime bar doesn't spawn thirty tooltips. One detail panel follows the cursor across the days, re-anchoring instead of reopening, with a beat of delay before it appears and a grace period before it leaves so crossing a gap never flickers it shut. Clicking pins it, and an app-wide single-open store guarantees only one pinned overlay exists at a time, anywhere in the dashboard.
Fixed enums, identical chips
Status pills take a variant and nothing else: icon, color, and label are locked, so every “Allocated” in the app reads identically. Free and allocated states reserve the same one-pixel border, so a swap never shifts a table column. Days in the uptime bar that share a status fuse into one capsule instead of thirty beads.
Time, told honestly
Uptime days are local midnights, and dates follow the calendar convention of whoever is looking; the server and the viewer are allowed to disagree about what “Jul 4” means, deliberately. Heartbeats read “2m ago” and tick every minute, with the full timestamp one hover away.
Density with mercy
A rack of lines collapses into overlapping glyph circles with a +N tail, and the label writes itself: “2 allocated, 1 shared”, each count tinted in its own hue. Source order is preserved; nothing floats to the front to editorialize.