May 2021 Summaries

The author discusses their recent focus on refreshing Temporal's core concepts documentation area, which had not been updated in a couple of years and was criticized for being too industry-term heavy. They decided to start with Workflows and realized that the definition of a workflow is already well established across various resources. However, understanding Temporal's overall strategy and language-specific implementation details simultaneously is crucial. The author discovered that not all users are after the same information, as there are at least four unique user groups accessing the documentation. To meet these users' information needs, they decided to separate content based on user personas. They also redesigned Temporal's documentation landing page and created a more immersive experience for different user personas.

The author discusses their experience with the Actor Model and its implementation in the Orleans project. They highlight four major conflations that often arise when discussing actors, including distributed vs local actors, supervision trees vs actors, message passing vs one-way messages, and state transition vs become. These conflations can lead to confusion and misunderstandings among developers. The author also expresses their belief that the term "actor" is an unfortunate choice for describing this model of computation, as it often leads to a barrier in adoption by the broader developer population. They suggest alternative terms such as "grains," "cloud native objects," or "durable objects" to help convey the benefits and applicability of the Actor Model more effectively.