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We had a fantastic opportunity to interview Rick Rothenberg, Senior Software Engineer at Para (www.usepara.com), about his experience with Golem. Here’s what he had to say.
Q: Could you give us a one-sentence pitch for Para?
Rick: Para is a personalized, voice marketing at scale using AI to facilitate that.
Q: When you first came across Golem, and considered it for Para, what solutions were you looking for?
Rick: We were having some hard problems in our space having to do with AI and voice, but what we found we were spending a lot of time doing is things that weren’t really our main differentiators. We were spending a lot of time working on getting cues right, getting distributed communication right, dealing with error handling, etc. We spent a lot of time doing things that we felt we shouldn't have to spend time on, so that is when we started looking at Durable Computing.
Q: What made you decide to prototype part of your backend on Golem specifically?
Rick: I had had some experience in the past with durable computing. I used Temporal IO and AWS Step Functions, and I thought this was a good solution to what we needed. I went searching for an article about Durable Computing and found the one that John (De Goes) wrote from Golem, and it was a great article to read. That was my first exposure to it, and I wasn’t even focusing on Golem yet. At the time, I just thought this was really good information to know.
Soon after, Adam Smith (founding engineer at Para) read it, and he became very interested in Golem specifically, and he’s the one that basically got us going with Golem.
Q: What is your overall take on Durable Computing?
Rick: I think it’s great, particularly Golem’s take on it where a lot of it is transparent. I had used other solutions, like Temporal IO, and it was nice, but it required a lot of learning manual things, and putting your attention on things that aren’t really part of your core competencies.
The beauty of Golem is that all that stuff is done for you, and you don’t have to think about those kind of problems. They’re just elegantly handled behind the scenes, and you can actually focus on what you’re bringing to the marketplace and not these common problems that everybody else has to solve.
Q: What kind of dramatic changes would you be able to anticipate seeing if a solution like Golem was adapted widely?
Rick: If everybody was using Golem, I think what we would see is a lot less time spent on these common problems and a lot more time spent on the real value that a company wants to add. This facilitates distributed computing.
In the old days, before the cloud, we didn’t really have these kinds of problems, but now in the cloud, this becomes crucial, and it shouldn’t be that hard to program in the cloud. It should be just as easy as the old days of doing batch computing. Golem goes a long way towards making that the case. It would mean that people could be much more productive quicker and spend less time, particularly troubleshooting. That’s where a lot of time is poured in.
Everybody programs these distributed solutions, without realizing how many edge cases there are, and how hard it is to get right. It’s not so much about the first time you write it, because everyone just looks it up somewhere and Googles or Chat GPT’s it, puts some code in, and then later lives to regret it, because as they scale up everything just goes to heck. I think Golem could go a long way towards making that a thing of the past.
Q: How does Golem differ from other Durable Computing solutions you may have looked at?
Rick: Golem is unique in the durable computing space by making it transparent and easy to use. Everywhere else you’re having to learn a product specifically, their API, and you still have to remember to do a lot of things correctly. With Golem, you just write your code, and it happens magically.
Q: How was it working with members of the Golem Cloud team?
Rick: Working with the Golem team has been wonderful. It’s been a great experience. We did not anticipate how valuable just working with the team would be. We’ve learned a lot, just talking to everyone. Everyone’s been so helpful, so informative. John (De Goes) brings in this massive wealth of knowledge, and it’s so illuminating. We’re so grateful for having the opportunity to work with everybody.
More details:
Watch the full interview here.
Join us in the Golem 1.0 official launch on August 23rd at 12pm EST streamed live on X and LinkedIn.
Be notified on launch details here.
Join the community and ask questions here.
