Two weeks before AI Engineer World's Fair, Monifa Contaste, from the Temporal field team, reached out to me with a problem that sounded technically fun and logistically deranged.
Temporal had an 8-foot-long USB-C keyboard made for Replay to run a typing contest with the awesome folks from Braintrust. It was built by WhiteClouds, required a pallet to move between events, and was exactly the kind of object that makes a conference booth feel like either a game show or a loading dock, depending on how your morning is going. We’d been invited to bring it along with us to AI Engineer World's Fair for a second Temporal booth with minimal notice and needed to figure out something to do with it.
I also had a pair of holographic fans from that same Replay that Temporal had used as part of the 404 Speakeasy. Fun side note: Replay, where I originally got those fans, was at Moscone West. I flew them home to New York, then flew them back to use them for the first time at Moscone South, a few blocks away from where I had picked them up. This is a normal and efficient way to move hardware if your goal is to make Delta feel under-appreciated.
Kristin Hillary, Temporal's Social Media Manager, had come up with the giant keyboard concept in the first place, and she decided I should be the person to take on the holographic fans. Mason Egger, Temporal Senior Solutions Architect, had already built the original version of Durable Wordle: a Wordle clone where each game session is a Temporal Workflow. I found out about his project at Datadog DASH, which turned out to be the only reason this idea was even remotely possible, because I also had a week of PTO scheduled in the middle of the build window.
