[andrewingram]

Temporal is an implementation of a paradigm I got interested in back in 2019. I wasn’t at one of those companies that had heard about Cadence, so when I was searching around to see if anyone had actually already built this idea I’d come up with, I stumbled upon Zenaton. It’s no longer around, didn’t get PMF, so I was happy when Temporal came out of stealth mode a few months later - was nice to have my intuition in this area validated.

We’ve been using Temporal quite successfully in Go (and more recently Python) for a little while now. It could do with being a bit easier to get up and running with, but day-to-day usage is very nice. I don’t think I could go back to plain out message queues, this paradigm is a real time saver.

The biggest challenge is deciding how many things are nails for the hammer that is Temporal. You tend to start out using it to replace an existing mess of task orchestration; but then you realise its actually a pretty good fit for any write operation that can’t neatly work in a single database transaction (because it’s hitting multiple services, technologies, third parties etc).

You have to be careful to keep your workflows deterministic, but once you get used to the paradigm, it’s enjoyable.