185: Workflow Orchestrators

Intro topic: Asymmetric Returns
News/Links:
NanoChat by Andrej Karpathy
https://github.com/karpathy/nanochat
Pydantic AI
https://www.marktechpost.com/2025/03/25/pydanticai-advancing-generative-ai-agent-development-through-intelligent-framework-design/
1000th Starlink this year
https://spaceflightnow.com/2025/05/16/live-coverage-spacex-plans-morning-launch-of-starlink-satellites-from-california/
ChatGPT Apps SDK
https://openai.com/index/introducing-apps-in-chatgpt/
Book of the Show
Patrick
The Will of the Many by James Islington
https://amzn.to/43IfU8Q
Jason
Interview with DHH (Founder of Ruby on Rails)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vagyIcmIGOQ
Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h
Tool of the Show
Patrick
Factorio
https://www.factorio.com/
Jason
nip.io
Topic: Workflow Orchestrators
Why
Batch jobs (embarrassingly parallel)
Long-running tasks (e.g. transcoding video)
Checkpointing/resuming
How
Message Queues
Containerization
Worker Pools & Autoscaling
History & Backfill
Steps to run workflows:
Containerize the workflow definition and send to the cloud
Containerize all the individual tasks
Submit job(s)
Examples
Airflow
Legacy but dominant
Dagster
Great UX for python developers
Temporal: https://temporal.io/
The new hotness
Ray
Low-level but very powerful
Kubeflow
Designed for ML workflows, integrated dashboard
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