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**Adam Stacoviak:** I guess it kind of depends on the company, too. Honeycomb is probably a different example. |
**Shawn Wang:** I haven't been a VP of engineering, so I only have some theories. I suggest you just ask the next VP of engineering that you talk to, or CTO. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. That'd be a good one to start asking people. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What do you do here? What is it you do here? |
**Shawn Wang:** What is it you do here? |
**Jerod Santo:** Exactly. |
**Shawn Wang:** \[laughs\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, I just wondered if there was a specific skillset that happens at that VP of engineering level that leads more towards a backender being more likely than a frontender to get hired into the role. |
**Shawn Wang:** I think there's some traditional baggage. Power structures persist for very long times... And for a long time UX and frontend was just not valued. And we're like maybe five years into the shift into that. It's just gonna take a long time. |
**Jerod Santo:** I agree with that. So tell us what you're up to now. You said you're doing workflows... I saw a quick lightning talk; you were talking about ["React for the backend"](https://youtu.be/Cxaf8E00GMM). So you're very much taking your frontend stuff into the backend here, with React for the backend. Tell us... |
**Shawn Wang:** Let's go for it. So at Netlify and at AWS I was essentially a developer advocate for serverless. So this is very cool - it does pay-as-you-go compute, and you can do a lot of cool stuff with it. But something that was always at the back of my mind bothering me, that serverless does not do well, is long-... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. |
**Shawn Wang:** And it made me realize that in this move to take apart everything and make everything as a service, we have gained scalability, but we've lost basically everything else. And what I was trying to do was "How do we reconstruct the experience of the monolith? What are the jobs to be done?" When you break i... |
I went through the exercise... I wrote a blog post called "Reconstructing the monolith, and I actually listed it out." So what are the jobs of cloud for a computer? You want static file serving, you want functions, you want gateway, you want socket management, job runners, queue, scheduler, cold storage, hot storage. T... |
The thing that serverless -- that had a whole in the ecosystem was job running. Not good. Basically, as an AWS developer right now, the answer is you set a CloudWatch schedule function, and you pull an endpoint, and that should read some states from a database, and check through where you are, and compute until the 15-... |
\[01:00:08.13\] The AWS current response to that is AWS Step Functions, which is a JSON graph of what happens after the other, and this central orchestrator controls all of that. I think we could do better, and that's eventually what got me to temporal. So essentially, this blog post that I wrote - people found me thro... |
**Jerod Santo:** Wow. That's spectacular. |
**Shawn Wang:** It's just the VC that invested in Temporal. So what Temporal does is it helps you write long-running workflows in a doable fashion; every single state transition is persisted to a database, in idiomatic code. So idiomatic Java, idiomatic Go, idiomatic JavaScript, and PHP. This is different from other sy... |
And these are all weird perversions of -- like, you wanna start simple; JSON is very simple, for doing boxes and arrows, and stuff like that... But you start ending up having to handwrite the AST of a general-purpose programming language, because you want variables, you want loops, you want branching, you want all that... |
So Temporal was created at Uber; it runs over 300 use cases at Uber, including driver onboarding, and marketing, and some of the trips stuff as well. It was open source, and adopted at Airbnb, and Stripe, and Netflix, and we have all those case studies on -- DoorDash as well, by the way, runs on the Uber version of Tem... |
**Jerod Santo:** There you go, Adam. |
**Shawn Wang:** And yeah, they spun out to a company two years ago, and we're now trying to make it as an independent cloud company. And again, the cloud strategy part comes in, right? Like, why should this be an independent startup, versus just being a functionality in other clouds? Because this is one of those intere... |
**Jerod Santo:** Nice. What I saw from your code that excited me, which I think was the coolest part, is - basically inside of this workflow, which looks like a serialized function, serialized meaning like step one, two, three, four, five, you have a step in there that says "Sleep for a month, and then wake up." |
**Shawn Wang:** Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** This is how you're implementing like a 30-day trial, or something, right? |
**Shawn Wang:** Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** Like, "Charge their Stripe card, make sure it's valid, and then sleep for 30 days. Wake up and actually charge the amount." I thought "Now, that's a cool demo right there." You got my interest. |
**Shawn Wang:** You liked it? \[laughs\] |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, that's sweet. |
**Shawn Wang:** So Temporal combines a database scheduler and a queue system. So why do we not currently do "sleep 30 days" in our system? Because it ties up cross-compute, and it's all in memory; like, it's gonna go away the moment your system goes down. So what you need to do is at every single point in time save any... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Interesting. What's the prediction then? So if this is the next -- |
**Jerod Santo:** He doesn't like to predict... \[laughs\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** ...big thing and you've got a knack for going to the right clouds... |
**Jerod Santo:** Nowcast us. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** ...or at least the most influential ones, what's your hot take -- would you call it your Nowcast...? What's your Nowcast for Temporal? What's gonna happen in the next -- what's now for the next six months, a year? What's the current now? |
**Shawn Wang:** Yeah, yeah. So for what it's worth, the multi-cloud story is not something we're pushing at all. It's just possible; it's not a main part of the story. The main part of the story is that people are doing long-running jobs badly, they're doing microservice orchestration badly, and that mostly comes out o... |
\[01:04:08.13\] We have centuries of distributed systems people here that solve that for you in a framework. If you just thought in our breakdown of workflow activities everything else is gonna behave predictably and testably, and you can maintain it. |
So I have a blog post for people who are interested on [Why Temporal](https://www.swyx.io/why-temporal/). That's literally the URL, WhyTemporal. The prediction really is about that microservices are exploding, serverless environments are exploding, and they need a way to manage complexity. Every time you call an API, y... |
The other thing which -- personally, for me, Netlify struggles to justify its value because people again don't value CDNs very much, basically because Cloudflare gives it away for free. It gives away a very, very good product. But I've noticed that database companies have no problems monetizing. You talk to Spencer at ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's right. |
**Shawn Wang:** ...or you talk to whoever runs MongoDB. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Fauna. |
**Shawn Wang:** Fauna, exactly. And that's because people know how to pay for storage. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Planet scale. |
**Shawn Wang:** They know how to pay for bandwidth, and compute, and all this. Very, very well-established things. And I think there's a very strong roadmap here that we can just follow, that doesn't take a rocket science genius at product-market fit, or whatever... And we're seeing it, by the way. We have strong custo... |
**Jerod Santo:** That's cool. |
**Shawn Wang:** And it's just absurd. The amount of product-market fit here is just amazing. It's an open source project, so you can self-host it, but we're seeing that people want to pay us to do it for them, and it's very serious companies. I see multiple instances where this has worked in the past, so I feel very sa... |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, we will hold off any further questions, because we're gonna bring you on JS Party for a full Temporal deep-dive, coming to a JS Party near you soon. Listeners, if you're not listening to JS Party, you've got something wired wrong. You've gotta head over there... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** [JSParty.fm](https://changelog.com/jsparty). |
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