Durable Execution: This Changes Everything
Abstract
How would you code if your application could not fail?
Consider how differently a senior engineer would approach the same project as someone just learning how to code. We can expect the neophyte to create something simple but impractical, while the senior engineer will create something complex but robust. A key difference between them is that the senior engineer, having supported production systems, recognizes the potential for failures—and the need to mitigate them. With each new failure, the senior engineer is conditioned to accept complexity in exchange for reliability. Perhaps they could learn from the neophyte, who embraces simplicity because they are oblivious to failure.
During this talk, you'll learn what Durable Execution is, trace its origins back to large-scale distributed systems developed at some of the world's largest tech companies, and understand why it's revolutionizing modern application development.
About the Presenter
Alternating between software engineering and technical education roles, Tom Wheeler's career spans more than 25 years in the financial, healthcare, defense, and tech industries. Prior to joining Temporal as the founding member of the Education team in 2022, he wrote training courses at Cloudera, developed aerospace engineering software at Object Computing, helped create a distributed system for high-volume data processing at WebMD, and built some of the earliest web applications at brokerage firm A.G. Edwards. When Tom manages to step away from the computer, you can probably find him cooking, traveling, or playing guitar.
