I started HotMesh in 2023 as a side project, driven mostly by curiosity. I had this idea that if I could scale down an integration server to something tiny—like the size of a postage stamp—it might close the gap between choreography and orchestration, effectively sidestepping a bunch of tradeoffs. I experimented until I found a pattern that puts the database in the middle, with stateless “mini” integration servers around the edges. I tested it with Postgres, Redis, and NATS, and it actually held up. What surprised me was how well it worked without piling on extra infrastructure. You just install the package on any microservice and point to a database. Nothing fancy, but it gets the job done. Because it felt like something new, I decided to re-implement Temporal.io from scratch using this approach, just to see if it could handle something big and complex. It took me about 9 months of late-night sessions after the kids were asleep, but I’m happy with the outcome and hopeful it can save others both time and money. For now, I’m putting out a TypeScript beta and will consider other languages once I’ve heard some feedback. Let me know what you think. The goal is to keep refining until it’s as straightforward and effective as I imagined.

HotMesh

Message oriented orchestration

Message oriented orchestration