This document introduces Temporal, a workflow engine, to engineers unfamiliar with its capabilities. Its aim is to demonstrate Temporal’s value for potential use in upcoming projects. Definitions Workflow - “At the highest level, workflows tend to be modeled as a set of activities invoked in some sequence where the completion of one activity flows directly into the start of the next activity.” Source Workflows vs Sagas Presentation Activity - “An Activity is a normal function or method that executes a single, well-defined action (either short or long running), such as calling another service, transcoding a media file, or sending an email message.

Managing multiple versions of your tooling can get quite difficult and tedious. There are solutions for specific languages such as Pipenv and Conda for Python. The downside is that you have 2 different package management systems associated with each and you’ll have to reach for a different tool to manage versions of a different programming language. Enter ASDF, the Multiple Runtime Manager. ASDF allows you to configure your tooling in a single config file per project.

At a previous (unnamed) company, I had the privilege of working on a core search project. The goal of this project was to simplify the architecture and reduce the latency in updating the search index based on user actions. In retrospect, this project could have gone a lot better if we had made use of tools and patterns that I learned after leaving the company. I think the team did the best with what we had available to us.

Apache Kafka is a powerful distributed data streaming platform. It allows you to build an event-based architecture where the consumers of data are decoupled from its production. An event source could be your production database, containing all the events for your e-commerce site, or clickstream data from your web app. If required, you can even maintain the order of events on a per-entity basis. This is a huge advantage over similar solutions, such as Amazon SQS.

There seems to have been a massive shift in the available supply of money for tech companies to burn. The ZIRP era has ended. The next question for me is how this will impact the way we build and sell software. Enter DHH and Jason Jason C. and DHH had a very interesting conversation in a recent edition of This Week in Startups regarding the impact of the recent belt-tightening required by the market shift.