We had the opportunity to interview the first-place winner of the Golem 1.0 Hackathon: Daniele Torelli!
Can you share your name and where you’re joining us from?
Daniele: I’m Daniele, and I’m joining you from Italy.
If you could describe Golem in your own words, what would you say?
Daniele: In my own words, Golem is a serverless, durable computing platform designed to build resilient backend services.
Based on your own professional experience, what would you say are the top uses for Golem?
Daniele: Given my background in distributed systems, I see Golem as being particularly useful for applications that require guaranteed durability and fault tolerance, such as business workflows or financial transaction systems, distributed system orchestration, commerce infrastructure management, etc.
What sort of solutions provide similar functionality to Golem that you might consider together with Golem to solve the same problems you just mentioned?
Daniele: I know some of them, like Temporal IO for example, Fermyon Cloud as well, but also some big players are coming, like AWS Lambda with the step functions, and Azure durable functions.
I saw there is also Cloud Flare durable objects. I didn’t have the chance to explore too much of those systems, but I think the competitive edge in Golem lies in the seamless durability and programs that can be written as simple code, so I think it’s the simplicity that makes Golem between all of those, in my opinion.
What made you want to register for the Golem 1.0 Hackathon?
Daniele: Because of my interest in durable computing, I wanted to participate and explore Golem and its potential, especially since I knew that Golem simplifies backend development, so I wanted to test myself there.
What would you say was your overall experience utilizing Golem?
Daniele: My experience was fantastic. The whole experience provided a fresh approach to durable computing. I was very impressed at how effortlessly I could deploy long-running stateful worker, especially the API around them, focusing only on business logic. That was key, and it was very great to experience.
What would you say is another favorite thing about Golem?
Daniele: I think the state persistent and automatic fault recovery, because the platform removes completely the complexity of managing state and retries, and let’s you worry only about your business logic: what you’re doing. That’s the only thing you need to think about, and leaving all the rest to the side and making it easy to create.
You just have to focus on your task, what you want to solve, without having to interact with databases or any external resources.
What would be a piece of feedback to help improve Golem?
Daniele: Yes, since Golem just launched, it would be nice to have support for more mainstream languages, and also have some tools to make debugging easier, as well as the real-time monitoring of the applications. That would make troubleshooting and optimization easier.
Do you have any advice in any developers that may be interested in joining a Golem hackathon?
Daniele: My advice would be to embrace the Golem capabilities fully, think beyond the traditional Cloud approach, and explore how Golem durability can simplify your design. That’s key.
Also, don’t hesitate to leverage the team and the community because they are very supportive.
They were supportive after I delivered my project with other things I wanted to fix, so don’t hesitate to ask them questions. There are extremely powerful capabilities that lie in Golem, and the team is very helpful.
Would you be returning for another Golem hackathon?
Daniele: I’ll be back for sure. Those who follow Golem channels know that was not my first hackathon. This time, again, was an amazing experience, and I can’t wait to attend a new one.
I’m also excited to see how Golem continues to evolve. I see a lot of progress going under the hood, and I’m looking forward to building even more complex, resilient systems next time.
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