Replay: Day One

Phew! What an amazing first day of talks at Replay 2023.

We kicked the day off with our fearless leader, Maxim, talking to us about the center of the solar system, and drawing a link between geocentric versus heliocentric views and event based architectures versus Temporal's Durable Execution. Changing your point of reference can make your mental model of your software development universe so much simpler to reason about.

Samar and Preeti then followed up with some great product announcements including Versioning, Schedules, Updates and some exciting things around HTTP API coming up. Versioning is one we are particularly excited about and many attendees shared the same sentiment with us! We'll have a more in depth post about this later on.

Some of other highlights from the day included:

Matt McDole from Yum! Brands updated us on his team's progress with Temporal, following up on his excellent talk at last year’s Replay conference. After great success migrating the KFC and Taco Bell ordering systems over to Yum’s new Temporal based commerce platform they have continued to iterate on the way they use and think about Temporal. Matt discussed the lessons they’ve learned as they refined their order workflows and expanded their use of Temporal to other systems.

Sai Pragna Etikyala shared the pain that Twilio felt under tight deadlines to meet new compliance requirements. The ability to slowly introduce Temporal to parts of their complex event driven architecture allowed Twilio to make fast and consistent progress towards meeting their goals, without risking large refactors or infrastructure changes. Temporal spread quickly across the team as their developers loved the fantastic developer experience.

Roberto Fernandez discussed the patterns Retool is using to improve the performance of executing DAGs of code blocks for their users. Their team developed algorithms to selectively combine the execution of multiple code blocks into a single activity, reducing their latency.

Chris Ludden and Anthony Davis presented the code generation approach they use at HashiCorp to allow their internal users to be more productive and avoid footguns. They have released their protoc plugin as open source for others to use and learn from and are definitely looking for feedback on what the community thinks!

Patroklos Stefanou walked us through Stripe’s experience using Temporal for managing Kafka Clusters, including a great use of signals to ensure that a human operator was always around when potentially dangerous operations were about to take place.

Dan Golant from Datadog gave us a tour of the when why and how for workflows vs services and his experience at different companies using Temporal and when it was most beneficial to use it. Particularly when we write service-oriented applications, we tend to rely on a frontend or a third party to coordinate all of the end to end logic. The key difference being that while in an MVP, we cover the most common path and then layer in escape hatches, corner cases, etcetera. While in the Temporal way, we model the best possible coverage of the use case sequentially, piece by piece, and then leverage the automation we have, but still kick people to manual treatment at the end.

In the afternoon, we hosted a series of "Birds of a Feather" sessions for attendees to ask all their burning questions about the Temporal SDKs. With the original authors in the room, we were to see the deep insights into the tools Temporal users work with every day. We saw questions across the board, from "How does the new Update feature actually work?" to "What's the best use case for Signals?" to "How do I emit custom metrics?"

We are looking forward to today for another great day and then celebrating together with our after party! In the meantime, check out the photos below from the event.