GOTO - The Brightest Minds in Tech

Building Better Software: Why Workflows Beat Code Every Time • Ben Smith & James Beswick

13 snips
Jan 6, 2026
Guest
Ben Smith
Ben Smith, a Staff Developer Advocate at Stripe, and James Beswick, Head of Developer Relations at Stripe, dive into why workflows can outperform conventional coding approaches. They discuss how workflows simplify error handling and idempotency, making distributed systems more manageable. The duo also tackles the importance of observability, the pitfalls of reintroducing monolith issues, and the nuances of building effective demos for developers. Their insights on gradually adopting extensions and navigating cloud services offer a fresh perspective for tech enthusiasts.
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INSIGHT

Workflows Replace Much Custom Orchestration

  • Workflows reduce the code you must manage and often provide serverless, pay-per-use scaling.
  • They let you visually orchestrate retries, catches, branching, and circuit breakers without extra application code.
ADVICE

Protect Downstream Calls With A Circuit Breaker

  • Use a circuit breaker to stop repeatedly calling known-faulty downstream services.
  • Query circuit status at execution start and route to escalation if the circuit is open.
INSIGHT

Workflows Make Versioning Less Fragile

  • Versioning and change are frequent in production and fragile when baked into code.
  • Workflows let you canary, tag, or route traffic to manage versions more visibly.
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