Temporal Node.js SDK: Orchestration for Distributed Logic

Every backend team I’ve managed eventually hits the same wall. You’ve got a multi-step operation — charge the customer, reserve inventory, send a notification, update the dashboard — and somewhere in the middle, something fails. Network blip. Downstream timeout. OOM kill. Now what?

The usual answer? A patchwork of retry logic, dead letter queues, state machines, and prayer. It works until it doesn’t. And debugging it when it doesn’t is its own special hell.