Eric Ziegler, Principal Software Engineer at The Washington Post’s Arc XP division, discussed how adopting Temporal, an open-source workflow orchestration platform, significantly improved their media workflows by enhancing efficiency and enabling the team to focus on innovation rather than infrastructure. By transitioning from a cumbersome legacy system to Temporal, they achieved a 600% improvement in runtime efficiency, particularly in developing an automated thumbnail selection system for videos, reducing processing time from 80 seconds to about 10 seconds for a four or five-minute video. Temporal's support for multiple programming languages and its ability to handle asynchronous tasks with durable execution proved essential for Ziegler's team, allowing them to distribute workloads across AWS instances and simplify management through features like Replay. This shift has opened up more opportunities for innovation, with Temporal's new features inspiring future projects, as Ziegler and his team continue to refine their media workflows and share their positive experience with Temporal's orchestration capabilities.