Developers and Distributed Systems and Dinosaurs, Oh MY!!!

If you were in the Seattle area on August twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth and DID NOT come to Replay, I am so very sorry. You missed an amazing event.

Temporal hosted its inaugural developer experience conference, encompassing everything from in-depth discussions around SDKs and live architecture reviews to Temporal 101 workshops, talks from Datadog, Stripe, Yum!, and, yes, actual real living dinosaurs. That last bit might be a slight exaggeration, but those who know, know.

Our main goal in hosting a conference was to bring our Temporal community together, better understand everyone’s needs, share what we have been up to and where we are headed, and have some fun while we are at it.

While it’s hard to capture the epic nature of the conference in a blog post, we can give you the highlights and encourage you to DEFINITELY attend next year.

Day One: Community Day - Workshops and Guided Discussions

It’s really important for us to understand how our customers are using our product, and encourage best practices along the way! For day one, we started with a series of hands-on ways to engage with us. This included architecture review, a 101 workshop, and in-depth conversations around our SDKs, and ended with a roadmap. We asked users and potential users to bring their own in-progress applications and services for an architecture review from Temporal experts.

This day was special, because we know our community is pretty incredible, but we’re so impressed—not only did we have plenty of volunteers share projects throughout the day for review, engage in conversations, and partake in the workshop, but we had too many. Your energy and engagement was top notch and we are still carrying that with us today! We have many people to follow up with after for more conversations and reviews. Did we mention we love our community? You all are doing some AMAZING things!

We held four Birds of a Feather-style discussions focused on Temporal SDKs, Server & Operations, Cloud, and Platform Engineering, hosted by Temporal team members. The Temporal representatives gave a high level overview to kick off the discussion and then talks were entirely led by people’s curiosities, questions, and comments.

After lunch, the Temporal 101 Workshop started. This was intended for those super new to all things Temporal, and it covered the basic architecture, how to create and execute a Workflow, how to use the Web UI, and the value around Activities. Towards the end, Tom Wheeler, the workshop leader, walked line by line through the code from the exercises to show what happens behind the scenes to facilitate a stronger understanding of Temporal.

We have some exciting news for those who weren’t able to take it: we will have it available via an online self-serve course as soon as this fall!

To wrap up day one, we shared our first ever Roadmap! In true Temporal teamwork fashion, this was presented from an array of integral team members. We covered a lot, but at a high level:

• A single binary - new users will be able to get started by installing the package from popular package managers such as apt and brew (thx, Datadog!)
• Advanced visibility on top of the SQL-based data store
• Multi-cursor functionality - improves persistence resource utilization as well as providing better isolation between tenants

Okay, so this was all amazing, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about the food and how good it was. Normally I wouldn’t even mention the food, but I’m still drooling thinking about it. Replay provided slow roasted wild salmon served with a preserved lemon aioli, grilled sliced chicken breast with fresh basic aioli, seasonal roasted vegetable and quinoa cakes, wild rice pilaf with dried cranberries and walnuts, a tomato, couscous, fregola and fresh herb salad, and an arugula watermelon feta salad. Hat tip to our fearless Amelia who helped keep us fueled with quality food.

Day Two: Talks

I’m going to go ahead and draw a line in the sand, my absolute favorite talk of the day was Maxim Fateev’s keynote, and this isn’t meant as a slight against all the absolutely amazing talks given throughout the day, but the incredible clarity of how Temporal does things vs the way things are traditionally done—it’s Cake Architecture; not Smoothie Architecture. As someone new to Temporal, I was particularly thankful for this insight on its own, but what made it even more beautiful to me was Maxim’s expression of emotion and appreciation for the community—making him more approachable and helping everyone feel welcome.

We had so many amazing talks. Many of you were quite keen on Yum! Brands’ talk highlighting how they are building a next generation eCommerce Platform to power KFC, Taco Bell, Habit Burger, and Pizza Hut. And a fan favorite, Paul Nordstrom’s afternoon keynote, which explored the evolution of software by comparing it to the evolution OF THE WORLD.

Here is the good news: if you missed out on this conference, you can watch the recordings via the Replay playlist on YouTube. We know it’s not the same, but we hope you can still enjoy it, and we’d love to hear from you... which was your favorite?

For those that are wondering—YES there will be a Replay next year, for sure, Dinosaurs and all.

The conference was amazing, truly, but we aren’t stopping there. We have so many things planned for this upcoming year that you can’t see on the roadmap or in these talks. Best way to find out more information and ensure you don’t have Temporal FOMO? Find us on twitter or linkedin or youtube.

Personally I am leveraging the knowledge and momentum of Replay to dive into the Python SDK, build out a couple of applications to deepen my knowledge around Workflows, Activities, and metrics, and continue inhaling knowledge via the monthly meetup, the application development guide, and documentation. By next year I’ll experience the conference, not as one new to Temporal, but as an expert—maybe even as one of the people helping with the architecture review or running a Birds of a Feather; if anything, I know I look forward to seeing YOU at next year’s event!