Temporal PHP SDK for Microservice Platform

The effort and competency required to build a new language SDK for Temporal is so high that we completely assumed it would always fall on us. When Spiral Scout approached us and showed serious interest in doing the work, we were very excited and interested.

Although the work is very complex, it makes it quite easy to validate if someone is capable of doing it at all. After a number of sessions with Spiral Scout it was clear that they had very strong engineers who could dive deep into system details.

A major concern was that even a skilled team would require so much hand holding such that it would invalidate the value they added in the first place. It became immediately clear that this was not an issue with Spiral Scout.

As a group they are incredibly driven and self motivated, almost always able to find solutions to the problems they encounter. They're also great about knowing when to not waste time and just ask for help. It's a hard balance to strike.

The key deliverable was a full fledged PHP SDK for Temporal. On top of the usual complexity that comes with a new language SDK, this project also had additional complexity. Instead of implementing things from scratch, there were limitations that required it to be implemented on the base of our existing Golang SDK. This meant that Spiral Scout's team not only needed to be proficient with PHP but also Golang. Once we agreed on high level details, the process was very iterative. Spiral Scout was great about constantly giving us updates about the current status and raising issues sooner rather than later. They happily adopted our processes such as GitHub, Slack etc. Overall the engagement was very consistent. There were never points where we felt worried or disconnected, it was a constant stream of information.