So you get a lot of back-and-forth over like “Is this the right way to do this or not?” But the sheer fact that there’s so many frontend developers is going to help push along the market by itself.
Good in the sense that they have more capability, bad in the sense that they don’t have the training sometimes to – they don’t have the same tooling. That’s a lot of what I saw at Netlify, that’s a lot of what you’re doing at AWS… It’s giving frontend developers more and more powers… Which is good and bad.
So I really like it on that front… I’m not sure if I’m nailing the “What is…” We’re still trying to figure out how to explain what it is. And it helps to handle consistency, it helps to handle declarative rendering, anything like that, which is a really useful mental model for breaking up your business logic. In other words, you write your components – you sort of componentize your services, and you send it to one central orchestrator, which on the frontend is React DOM, and on the backend it’s Temporal. So essentially, Temporal is a workflow engine, which means it handles a lot of things for you, and you sort of write things on top of it, which is why I like to make the analogy that it’s React for the backend. Job running is actually a very valuable thing.” So I started to dig into that a little bit more, and I would have taken another 15 years - because that’s how long the founders of Temporal took to create it - to eventually find my way towards something like this. Sidekiq is the default Rails job runner, and Sidekiq is run by Mike Perham, who is just one developer who makes two million dollars a year selling support contracts on his open source software. And I’ve been very inspired by it ever since I heard about Sidekiq from the Indie Hackers Podcast. It’s not immediately obvious why that’s a big deal at all, but if you look at the jobs to be done of the cloud, you can think about compute, storage, memory… There’s long-term storage, there’s short-term storage, there’s all these sorts of variations, and one of the things that I was looking at when I was looking at the serverless ecosystem versus the traditional serverful and monolith ecosystem was the ecosystem of job runners, or anything long-running. So anything that goes beyond the single request/response cycle. So at its most humblest form, Temporal is a workflow engine where you can write long-running processes. Something that I did, actually, was as I was going through Netlify and I was at AWS and I wrote this, I actually wrote down what I thought was missing from cloud… And that’s how I’ve found Temporal, because I was like, “Let’s list down the jobs to be done of the monolith that we lost when we broke everything apart into distributed cloud services.” And then I’ve found that there’s some things that were just not answered that well, and that’s eventually how I made my way to Temporal - because I wrote a blog post, and they found me. I think that’s something that has really benefitted my own career. But you can even help people who are more knowledgeable and more advanced than you, because if you prove yourself to be a good co-worker or like a good foil for them to test their messaging, then it gets really helpful.
It’s better to do it in a group and learn together, and you can actually help a lot of people who are just a little bit behind you. I think it also helps this whole thing become a bit less lonely. We’ll take you closer to the metal with no ads, extended episodes, outtakes, bonus content, a deep discount in our merch store (soon), and more to come.
Start your free 14-day trial at Ĭhangelog++ – You love our content and you want to take it to the next level by showing your support. Set thresholds for your alert based on an increase in error count, a spike in load time, or new issues introduced in the latest deployment. Raygun – Never miss another mission-critical issue again - Raygun Alerting is now available for Crash Reporting and Real User Monitoring, to make sure you are quickly notified of the errors, crashes, and front-end performance issues that matter most to you and your business.
Learn more and try it for free at /changelog Instead of building internal tools from scratch, the world’s best teams, from startups to Fortune 500s, are using Retool to power their internal apps. Retool – Retool is a low-code platform built specifically for developers that makes it fast and easy to build internal tools.