You can absolutely approach it that way, but AFAIK those are highly integrated but still discrete solutions. Temporal provides a unified model for these things instead of requiring people to stitch things together themselves. Due to Temporal handling all of the things, you also get additional value out of the centralization (you can see the live source of truth for any running business process).
I do agree that Temporal is heavyweight both in terms of the learning curve and deployment requirements.
For disclosure I’m the Head of Product at Temporaly. We know things can be better and we are working on it.
I can't wait for Temporal's cloud offering to work for the "small dev". It would be so wonderful to only need to worry about the learning curve of using the tool, and not the deployment + cost. It would be great to be able to reach for it for any little project that needed robust persistent workflows.
Temporal provides a unified backend for automatically managing implicit application state that is normally stored in transient queues, databases etc. Furthermore, Temporal does this without explicitly requiring the developer to think about and manage the state themselves. This means developers spend way more time building stuff that actually matters, and less time writing buggy reliability code.
I personally find the best way to explain it is with an analogy. Back in the late 90s many developers built applications with C and therefore had to manage their own memory. For a long time, this was not wasted effort as it was the only real option. But then, Java came around and offered an experience where developers didn't have to manage their memory. And for the majority of apps, the performance and capabilities of Java were more than sufficient. At this point, writing the average application in C meant you were doing a serious amount of undifferentiated work. Furthermore, most developers weren't that great at memory management so choosing to do it by hand meant more work for a worse result.
The value proposition of Temporal is nearly identical, but instead of manually managing memory with C, developers are manually managing state using queues, CRON services, databases and more. The result is a bunch of time spent doing undifferentiated things that a computer would have done better anyway.
A language runtime that runs your code in durable way (every step of program execution is persisted so that if there’s a failure—even the machine running the program losing power—execution can be continued), and a service that enables that durability in a scalable way.
Manually is writing code to read and write to the DB. Automatically is writing code, and all the code state (local variables, execution progress) is persisted for you.
I can’t have an api running on top of temporal. Temporal is great for my api to delegate data processing but I can’t deploy a go http server purely “on temporal”. I still need it to run somewhere, on VMs or kubernetes.
I think "for profit company controlling the SE you're Oing for and changing things as they see best benefits them" is the bigger part of the problem though.
I think Medium barely has a community. I also think you're right when you say
> I find the discussion of HOW to get communities onto better platforms to be a more interesting topic than why the current platform sucks, especially when that platform doesn't even seem to listen to the criticism.
But you need to remember that's a very progressive position. Most friends I have are completely unaware that Medium has become a crap platform
Define barely. With all due and sincere respect, have you ever tried to build an audience or community from zero without partners, a leverage point, or an ad budget?
Even getting a quality audience of thousands is non-trivial or costs money or needs a clever strategy.
It reminds me of when people say, "I have an idea for a startup but I'm worried about people stealing it."
I try to explain, look, unless you're John Carmack or are we'll known for certain expertise, or have a track record, likely you can post your idea publicly on your blog and no one will ever copy it, even if it's a decent concept.
It's a rough analogy, but the point is people just don't care about things as much as we might think, unless they have a good reason to (like it's Carmack's new startup).
> With all due and sincere respect, have you ever tried to build an audience or community from zero without partners, a leverage point, or an ad budget?
Yes.
> Even getting a quality audience of thousands is non-trivial or costs money or needs a clever strategy.
That hasn't been my experience. I started with a blog. Then I wrote a book which I published online a chapter at a time. Now I'm on a second book.
I'm at the point now where I'm lucky enough to have many more people read what I write than I ever expected. My first book has sold many many more copies in print, EPUB, and Kindle than I ever dreamed.
I don't think I had a clever strategy. I just put a ton of effort into writing things that people find valuable. I think the real problem many people suffer from is that they aren't trying to do that. They have mostly selfish goals around growing their brand or their business, and actually satisfying readers is merely a means to that end.
I certainly personally benefit much more than I ever expected from mt writing, but if I ever felt like a I wrote a thing that wasn't worth the time a reader spends reading it, I'd delete it in a heartbeat.
> I try to explain, look, unless you're John Carmack or are we'll known for certain expertise, or have a track record, likely you can post your idea publicly on your blog and no one will ever copy it, even if it's a decent concept.
You say that like it's a bad thing. I don't believe you need to be a celebrity or a world-renowned expert. (I'm neither.) But you do need to have something that's worth the reader's time if you want to have a lot of readers. Otherwise, how are you making the world better?
That being said, it's also totally fine to not have a lot of readers. Everyone starts somewhere and writing not-too-great things for a small number of readers is the first step on the path towards writing better things for more people. The Beatles did not play their first show to a sold out arena, and that's great, because they weren't that good then either.
Your audience naturally grows with your skills. That's the system working as intended.
>> [getting a quality audience of thousands of people is non-trivial, costs money, or needs a clever strategy]
>That hasn't been my experience...
It's kind of begging to differ with...yourself? There are some contradictions here.
You say you did it in part by writing books, yet typically writing books is considered non-trivial. If these books are trivial to write that doesn't make them bad. However, it could give the impression that on average writing a book is easy. Special cases withstanding, it is not easy.
>I just put a ton of effort into writing things
Putting in "tons of effort" is also generally not considered trivial. I guess you meant it required trivial skills, rather than a trivial amount of time. Great. However it still conflicts with your thesis because it means some part of this approach is not trivial, and these clarifications matter when the phrase tons of effort is used.
My point is, it can be very hard to build communities from scratch. Many people just can't do it, or can do it only after building the skillset over years of practice. Most pros avoid starting from scratch whenever possible, many accelerate the process through investment.
It sounds like you've managed to overcome a lot of obstacles with gumption, hard work, and some good intuition about the process. That's a nice accomplishment.
However for the purposes of those considering taking on the task, it's worth noting I can't see how it refutes anything I've said. I'm glad you were successful, and it seems you may have a knack for it. For others, I think it's useful to take care to not underestimate it.
Sorry, I guess I glossed over the "non-trivial" part on first read.
I certainly have put a lot of effort into this, but all of that effort went into the thing itself that the audience was consuming. It's not like I wanted an audience for X and then had to put non-trivial effort into Y. By analogy, bands makes much of their money from selling T-shirts, which is effort unrelated to making the music that people want to listen to.
I didn't spend a lot of time making T-shirts. I just made the best music I could and it turned out in my case to be sufficient.
> Define barely. With all due and sincere respect, have you ever tried to build an audience or community from zero without partners, a leverage point, or an ad budget?
The Internet has been building communities from its inception. Medium has nothing on the average fan forum, IRC channel or even subreddit. They grow organically and if moderated properly, can last decades on zero budget.
But it also seems like you're not talking about actual communities, but about potential sales targets (ad budget? partners?).
The Internet hasn't built any communities. It's provided a fertile environment for people to create and grow them.
HTTP hasn't built any web services, people do that. Of course it true it sure does seem to have be conducive to allowing them to flourish, but having good soil, and having a skilled gardener growing something in it are distinct things.
Yes, countless communities have grown organically without someone explicitly planning, defining objectives, and thinking of these communities as important pieces of some business strategy.
Indeed, it didn't happen at all in the early days, and happens more and more now as it's become more obvious how much influence it can have on the success of certain businesses.
Your comment is a bit cynical. Thinking about a community as part of a business plan does not automatically mean exploiting people as sales targets, being at odds with respect for privacy, or other nefarious things than sometimes happen.
In fact it can be just as important to leverage the power of a strong community for a non-profit with altruistic goals. It's just a powerful new dynamic that has to be reckoned with like any other new phenomenon in tech and can be used for good or evil depending on what you stand for, just like most new innovations, or in this case an emergent social construct property of the Internet.
Hey guys,I've created the project to facilitate sharing and testing of other users terminal setups.
I love feedback and am open to all PRs, so please don't hold back.
Also for those who don't want to read the post, https://github.com/rylandg/myos is the repo, leave a star if you like what you see.
I do agree that Temporal is heavyweight both in terms of the learning curve and deployment requirements.
For disclosure I’m the Head of Product at Temporaly. We know things can be better and we are working on it.