Spooky Stories: Chilling Temporal anti-patterns (part 2)

This post provides guidance on Temporal best practices through a series of anti-patterns, framed with horror movie analogies. It details how to avoid 'mega workflows' by breaking them into smaller, manageable workflows, leveraging Nexus for inter-team process management. It advocates for using Temporal's native state management over external state machines to prevent 'split-brain' scenarios. The post also advises on error handling, recommending the use of default infinite retries for activities unless business logic strictly requires limited retries, and emphasizes the use of compensation patterns (Saga pattern) to ensure successful outcomes even when intermediate steps fail. Finally, it highlights the importance of Temporal's observability features (SDK metrics, Cloud metrics, Web UI, Search Attributes) for debugging and understanding workflow execution.