A Workflow Engine within your Code

Scratch your own itch: why we are building Zenaton

A startup’s success is tied to its speed, its ability to iterate on its product but also oftentimes on its processes (namely business- and marketing-related). For ten years now, I’ve been constantly frustrated by how slow improvements to those processes have been.

Now, I don’t know if those workflows were the right ones at the right time, but I do know that we were never able to put them in place fast enough, to test them quickly, to improve them continually — and that’s a fatal error for a startup.

Let’s take an example that seems simple: in a marketplace, a user makes a request and is waiting for estimates from professionals within the next hour. The initial implementation would be:

Actually here is a non-exhaustive list of the problems that you may run into, and more importantly improvements that you will want to make:

These kinds of natural evolutions will push your technical team to create state variables that describe the specific situation in which a user’s request finds itself. Then the process, which repeats every minute, will find requests to handle and, according to their states, try to complete the correct actions.

Any changes will make certain states obsolete. And when introducing anything new, you’ll quickly make the code and databases difficult to understand. You won’t be able to see the process as a whole, and it will even be difficult to clearly see what has been coded. As a result, the tech team will lose lots of time trying to maintain/understand the system so that nothing breaks and to respond to the problems that will inevitably occur. The process itself will slowly deteriorate.

Given these difficulties, major startups (those with 100s of software engineers you do not have) have developed their own solutions:

In the above example (written in python):

Not bad for 10 lines of code, eh?

There are numerous benefits to this approach:

We are still at the very beginning of our vision implementation, but Zenaton already proposes an elegant solution to orchestrate workflows — aiming a great simplicity and available for use with multiple languages (currently PHP, javascript, python, working on more).

I think the advantages for developers are significant (no configuration needed, ability to test locally, scalable architecture, resilient). I hope this should allow startups with limited technical teams to offer the same rich services as major companies with engineering teams numbering in the hundreds.

Please contact me if you have any questions or suggestions :)

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