Tom Wheeler

Principal Curriculum Developer and Developer Advocate @ Temporal Technologies

@TemporalTom

Alternating between software engineering and technical education roles, Tom Wheeler's career spans more than 25 years in the financial, healthcare, aerospace, and tech industries. Prior to joining Temporal, he created and taught training courses at Cloudera, developed engineering software at Boeing as a consultant for Object Computing, Inc. (OCI), helped design and implement a high-volume data processing system for WebMD, and wrote code for some of the earliest web applications at A.G. Edwards. Tom enjoys learning new things and teaching them to others, which has led to presentations at several conferences, including Strange Loop, Gateway Java Symposium, OSCON, JavaOne, and APIDays Paris. When Tom manages to step away from the computer, you can probably find him cooking, traveling, or playing guitar.

Talk Session

Building Resilient Distributed Systems through Event Sourcing

As developers continue to seek scalability and availability, we increasingly design systems that scale beyond the capabilities of a single machine. What were once function calls that executed on a single processor are now RPC calls that communicate across the network. The result is often a system that is more complex and less reliable.

During this talk, Tom will explain how an open source platform called Temporal uses event sourcing to provide durable execution of application code. By differentiating between deterministic and non-deterministic code, this approach allows developers to build scalable, highly available distributed systems in which an application will continue running to completion despite a program crash or even a total outage of all servers running the application.