A Temporal engineer shares how they built a custom conference registration system for Replay 2026 using Temporal Workflows and Activities. The system handled payments, coupons, ticket management, email notifications, and check-in across a months-long lifecycle. Key architectural decisions included treating each order as a durable process (Order Workflow) and giving every ticket its own child Workflow, enabling independent state management per attendee. Activities encapsulated all external calls (payment processor, email, database) with configurable retry/backoff policies, eliminating custom retry logic. The post covers coupon validation, idempotent payments, live-updating ticket counts via a long-running stats Workflow, and Workflow versioning for in-flight changes. It also previews new Temporal features like Standalone Activities and Serverless Workers that will simplify future iterations.
