Failure resistant systems end up having a bespoke implementation of a project management workflow built into them and then treating each task like a project to be managed from start to finish, with milestones along the way.

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doctorpangloss 3 hours ago | parent [-]

another POV is that solutions that require no long term "durable workflow" style storage provide exponentially more value. if you are making something that requires durable workflows, you ought to spend a little bit of time in product development so that it does not require durable workflows, instead of a ton of time making something that isn't very useful durable.

for example, you can conceive of a software vendor that does the end-to-end of a real estate transaction: escrow, banking, signature, etc. The IT required to support the model of such a thing would be staggering. Does it make sense to do that kind of product development? That is inventing all of SAP, on top of solving your actual problem. Or making the mistake of adopting temporal, trigger, etc., who think they have a smaller problem than making all of SAP and spend considerable resources convincing you that they do.

The status quo is that everyone focuses on their little part to do it as quickly as possible. The need for durable workflows is BAD. You should look at that problem as, make buying and selling homes much faster and simpler, or even change the order of things so that less durability is required; not re-enact the status quo as an IT driven workflow.

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majormajor 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Chesterton's Fence, no?

Why are real-estate transactions complex and full of paperwork? Because there are history books filled with fraud. There are other types of large transactions that also involve a lot of paperwork too, for the same reason.

Why does a company have extensive internal tracing of the progress of their business processes, and those of their customers? Same reason, usually. People want accountability and they want to discourage embezzlement and such things.

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leoqa 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Durable workflows are just distributed state machines. The complexity is there because guaranteeing a machine will always be available is impossible.

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whattheheckheck 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Interesting thought but how do you sell an idea that sounds like...

"How we've been doing things is wrong and I am going to redesign it in a way that no one else knows about so I don't have to implement the thing that's asked of me"

	▲	doctorpangloss 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Haha, another way of describing what you are saying is enterprise sales: “give people exactly what they ask for, not what makes the most sense.” Businesses that require enterprise sales are probably the worst performing category of seed investing. They encompass all of Ed tech and health tech, which are the two worst industry verticals for VC; and Y Combinator has to focus on an index of B2B services for other programmers because without that constraint, nearly every “do what you are asked for” would fail. Most of the IT projects business do internally fail! In fact I think the idea you are selling is even harder, it is much harder to do B2B enterprise sales than knowing if the thing you are making makes sense and is good.