Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders S8 E28: Maxim Fateev, Temporal
Oct 24, 2023
Maxim Fateev, tech entrepreneur and CEO/co-founder of Temporal who built distributed systems at Amazon and Uber. He tells the creation story of durable execution and the Cadence/Temporal projects. Conversations cover building systems fast at Uber, design trade-offs like Cassandra and pragmatism, scaling for multi-tenant use, and the move toward a SaaS cloud offering.
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Make Pragmatic Trade-Offs Early
- Prioritize pragmatic trade-offs when resources are limited: adopt familiar abstractions and existing databases to ship sooner.
- Defer full redesigns and custom storage until you have time and funding to do them right.
Storage Choice Forces Design Work
- Choosing Cassandra forced many engineering compromises because Temporal required transactional semantics Cassandra wasn't built for.
- That constraint drove significant extra work to make the system reliable on top of an imperfect store.
Let Developers Drive The Roadmap
- Let developers drive your roadmap by listening to their real use cases and participating in support and community channels.
- Build missing abstractions revealed by repeated customer problems rather than guessing needs internally.