Forge: A dashboard for developer tooling

Forge gives engineering teams a single place to deploy, monitor, and debug their services. The challenge with a tool like this is density: there’s a lot to show, and developers live in it all day. The goal was a control plane that stays calm under heavy information load.

The problem

The earlier dashboard treated every metric as equally urgent. Color was used decoratively, so when something actually broke, nothing stood out. Developers were scanning noise to find signal.

Approach

I built a restrained system: neutral surfaces, a tight type scale, and color reserved almost entirely for status. Real-time data got predictable layouts and clear empty, loading, and error states, so the interface felt steady even when the systems behind it weren’t.

It’s the rare dashboard that gets quieter the more you understand it.

Staff Engineer, Forge

Outcome

• Time-to-detect for incidents dropped measurably in usability testing.
• A consistent set of data-display patterns scaled across new product areas.
• Became the reference for Forge’s broader interface language.