I put Temporal's Rust SDK 1.0 on a conference badge

A Rust SDK team member created Durable Trivia for RustConf to test whether a Replay 2026 ESP32-S3 conference badge could function as a real Temporal Activity Worker rather than relying on an HTTP proxy. In the game, Temporal Cloud stores durable Workflow state while a MacBook runs the Workflow Worker and controller, and badges poll a shared Task Queue, display questions, heartbeat while awaiting button input, and complete Activities with players’ answers. A deliberate button combination simulates a Worker crash by stopping heartbeats, allowing Temporal to retry the unanswered question on another badge while preserving scores, deadlines, and game state. Porting the Rust SDK required limited ESP-IDF compatibility patches for Tokio-related platform assumptions, missing 64-bit atomics, embedded platform discovery, and an unused parser that caused an Xtensa compiler failure, producing an 8.44 MB firmware image that fit comfortably in the badge’s application partition. Development also involved automated hardware-in-the-loop testing, Workflow versioning to revise task scheduling safely, external contributions from the SDK team, and a travel router to avoid venue-network uncertainty. Although getting the Worker running proved more feasible than expected, operating ten badges reliably revealed practical challenges, particularly an idle-sleep feature whose slow wake behavior confused booth visitors and had to be removed and reflashed during the conference.

No tracked trend matches for this post yet.

Use this post, company, and trend context to find content marketing opportunities, perform competitive analysis, or address product feature gaps via the Plushcap MCP server or the Plushcap API.