> all the intro and docs assume you understand the problem and couch the discussion in somewhat domain specific language. It might be interesting to me. It might even be relevant to me and I don't know it yet. The problem is I need to work really hard to get to the point of understanding that.

> This is an appeal to authors of such posts: please give a motivation that provides the necessary background to understand the problem, and ideally do so in a way that a technical but non specialist reader can understand.

I agree with this. For Show HN posts, this would really help broaden the audience as well as lift up the audience’s knowledge and enthusiasm.

Oh, I get it. Let me give a simple example that hopefully explains waymark. Can't guarantee it'd be helpful to you, but beyond the website (we got nice animations and explainers there, you should check it out if you haven't) this might be helpful cause it comes from a well-known architectural problem.

Consider a microservices architecture (for the sake of example), where a user sign up needs to create an account in three services: auth-svc, avatars-svc and emails-svc.

Your options to do it are either an event-sourcing architecture where your services have to orchestrate together via somewhat-awkward message-passing, or write another reconciling service where you write the logic more-or-less directly, but with a ton of code-overhead to make the execution reliable.

Waymark would help with the second approach, because it soaks in all the durable execution complexity, and gives you a way to just write the logic code and handle the edge cases - with a fraction of the code and systems you'd need otherwise.

I'd even dare to say - a tool like waymark, the second approach is pretty much impractical altogether, hence why the event sourcing microserivce architectures dominate today.

But, yet again, that's just one example of where waymark would be useful. If you can write the code where you can split the orchestration logic from the execution of the individual side effects - then with waymark your orchestration code can be just the logic you need, without the extra steps to persist the progress - thus making it easier to reason and mental model simpler.