[Weekend Drop] Temporal — the iPhone of System Design

<p><em>This is the audio version of </em><a href="https://www.swyx.io/why-temporal/"><em>the essay I published</em></a><em> on Monday</em>.</p><p>I'm excited to finally share why I've joined <a href="http://temporal.io/">Temporal.io</a> as Head of Developer Experience. It's taken me months to precisely pin down why I have been obsessed with Workflows in general and Temporal in particular.</p><p><br>It boils down to 3 core opinions: Orchestration, Event Sourcing, and Workflows-as-Code.</p><p><em><br>Target audience: product-focused developers who have some understanding of system design, but limited distributed systems experience and no familiarity with workflow engines<br></em><br></p><p><a href="https://www.swyx.io/why-temporal/#30-second-pitch"><strong><br>30 Second Pitch<br></strong></a><br></p><p><br>The most valuable, mission-critical workloads in any software company are long-running and tie together multiple services.</p><ul> <li> <strong>Because this work relies on unreliable networks and systems</strong>:<ul> <li>You want to standardize timeouts and retries.</li> <li>You want offer "reliability on rails" to every team.</li> </ul> </li> <li> <strong>Because this work is so important</strong>:<ul> <li>You must never drop any work.</li> <li>You must log all progress.</li> </ul> </li> <li> <strong>Because this work is complex</strong>:<ul> <li>You want to easily model dynamic asynchronous logic...</li> <li>...and reuse, test, version and migrate it.</li> </ul> </li> </ul><p><strong><br>Finally, you want all this to scale</strong>. The same programming model going from small usecases to millions of users without re-platforming. Temporal is the best way to do all this — by writing idiomatic code known as <strong>"workflows"</strong>.</p><p><a href="https://www.swyx.io/why-temporal/#requirement-1-orchestration"><strong><br>Requirement 1: Orchestration<br></strong></a><br></p><p><br>Suppose you are executing some business logic that calls System A, then System B, and then System C. Easy enough right?</p