Hacker News: coltmcnealy

New comment by coltmcnealy in "Workflow Engine for Async Microservice Flows"

coltmcnealy — Fri, 01 May 2026 12:47:37 +0000

Old article I wrote a few years back, but it's come up a few times. Even with all of the new AI buzz, good engineering principles never change.

Workflow Engine for Async Microservice Flows

coltmcnealy — Fri, 01 May 2026 12:46:59 +0000

Article URL: https://littlehorse.io/blog/callbacks

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47974170

Points: 4

# Comments: 2

Show HN: Quarkus Extension for LittleHorse

coltmcnealy — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 22:06:33 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/littlehorse-enterprises/lh-quarkus

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47471983

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by coltmcnealy in "Business-as-Code with LittleHorse 1.0"

coltmcnealy — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 22:53:19 +0000

Generating workflows from JSON is actually not new but rather old...the first versions only had that and we added the DSL in Java (and other languages) after that. Under the hood everything in our system is protobuf and it's trivial to translate from JSON to proto and such

New comment by coltmcnealy in "Business-as-Code with LittleHorse 1.0"

coltmcnealy — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 22:32:19 +0000

Temporal is durable execution...it lets you restart code where it left off. LittleHorse workflows are at a higher level and the server actually understands the process rather than memoizing side effects for later attempts.

You get much better e2e observability + debugging this way. Also can more easily model higher-level processes and handle concurrently-running versions of workflows.

Side note: we also have durable execution within a Task Worker via `context.executeAndCheckpoint(...)`

New comment by coltmcnealy in "Business-as-Code with LittleHorse 1.0"

coltmcnealy — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 22:26:01 +0000

We just launched LittleHorse Server 1.0: an open-source workflow engine for Business-as-Code (SDKs in Java, Python, C#, and GoLang), built for microservices, event-driven systems, and long-running processses.

Business-as-Code lets you write code that orchestrates your business process at a high level, while handling low-level integration for you. Similar idea to Infrastructure-as-Code but for your business process logic rather than infra configuration.

LH also has a two-way integrations with Kafka: our Kafka Connectors signal waiting workflows or trigger new ones, and the Output Topic produces a CDC-style stream of workflow events into Kafka.

Would love feedback if you're dealing with stuff like retries / DLQ's / SAGA / Outbox Pattern, etc.

Business-as-Code with LittleHorse 1.0

coltmcnealy — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 22:26:01 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/littlehorse-enterprises/littlehorse

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47432178

Points: 20

# Comments: 7