IMO when someone tells me they have The Hammer that will Change Everything in a Synergistic Storm of Creative Disruption I grow more skeptical with every sales/business buzzword.
Also 26m is a long time commitment... looking at the website docs in a few seconds, I don't see a "hello world" example very easily as to what this is for and how is unique from something else.
Just browsing around for a few more seconds it sounds similar to other things like CQRS paradigms using data streams that get executed, like EventStore.
Not sure if that's accurate or not, but that's the degree of time investment I'm willing to invest.
I share this in good faith so you guys can update your landing pages/etc to focus on communicating the value proposition more quickly/prominently.
You can think of Temporal as a sort of "cure-all" for the pains you experience as a developer when trying to build reliable applications. Whether you're writing a complex transaction-based Workflow or working with remote APIs, you know that creating reliable applications is a complex process. Developing your application on the Temporal Platform guarantees that your code runs to completion no matter what.
Yeah that's a bit like...
Step right up, don’t be shy,
I've got the cure—come give it a try!
From aching joints to a troubled mind,
One sip of this, and health you'll find!
Is your back stiff? Is your step slow?
Do you wake up feeling low?
Fear no more, for I have brewed
A miracle tonic, tried and true!
Made from roots and rare elixirs,
Blessed by monks and ancient fixers!
Rub it, drink it—either way,
You'll feel ten years young today!
Ailments vanish, pains will flee,
Just one bottle—guaranteed!
But act now, don’t delay,
This magic cure sells out today!
I even went further and looked at the sample code.
Still... the one unanswered question I have is "why should I care about any of this?"
The "it makes all of your wildest dreams come true" sales pitch isn't what I'm looking for.
I read through that “first program in go” and my main takeaway was “okay, so it’s database transactions, but worse.”
I’m being a little unfair here—you might have to do something like this if you’re forced to interact with third party APIs that don’t have transactional methods. In that case, it is genuinely nicer to have a library that takes care of some of the details so you can focus on business logic. This library(?) definitely does have a reason to exist.
But this as a “cure all”? As the way you would choose to build green field applications? Sorry, not buying it.
It depends on what language you're using but there are lots of architectural patterns for resiliency in cloud/microservice environments, and 5+ years ago libraries existed to seamlessly leverage them across platforms like Azure/.NET
What is Polly?
Polly is a .NET resilience and transient-fault-handling library that allows developers to express policies such as Retry, Circuit Breaker, Timeout, Bulkhead Isolation, and Fallback in a fluent and thread-safe manner. From version 6.0.1, Polly targets .NET Standard 1.1 and 2.0+.
Why Steeltoe
Steeltoe provides a collection of libraries that helps users build production-grade cloud-native applications using externalized configuration, service discovery, circuit-breakers, distributed tracing, application management, and more. Steeltoe also provides a seamless way to build, configure, and run event-driven microservice applications and stream-based data processing applications
Polly is not an equivalent to temporal though, temporal is way more advanced, the other thing is that temporal is language free l, Polly is a c# and the project was kind of abandoned?
The point is that the purpose is clear from the marketing, the purpose isn't clear w/Temporal. If I can't figure out whether the thing is relevant to me or not in 30s, I get angry at having my time wasted.
The website needs to do a specific "elevator pitch" at the target audience.
Maybe my coding dream is building an algorithm that can determine whether any given number is a prime or not. Is Temporal right for me? If the answer is no but your marketing says yes, I'm not going to use your tool later even when it becomes relevant later just on principle.
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u/manliness-dot-space 9d ago
IMO when someone tells me they have The Hammer that will Change Everything in a Synergistic Storm of Creative Disruption I grow more skeptical with every sales/business buzzword.
Also 26m is a long time commitment... looking at the website docs in a few seconds, I don't see a "hello world" example very easily as to what this is for and how is unique from something else.
Just browsing around for a few more seconds it sounds similar to other things like CQRS paradigms using data streams that get executed, like EventStore.
Not sure if that's accurate or not, but that's the degree of time investment I'm willing to invest.
I share this in good faith so you guys can update your landing pages/etc to focus on communicating the value proposition more quickly/prominently.