# FAQ

Q: Who built Journey?

A: I did! I'm MarkMark (opens in a new window) , a software engineer in Seattle, WA.

Q: Why did you build Journey?

A: I noticed that throughout my professional life, I had built a lot of things which, at their core, boiled down to workflows, with persistence, scalability, crash recovery, and fault tolerance, with some tooling for diagnostics and analytics. Oh, and they also had some actual business logic enmeshed with that non-trivial infrastructure.

So I "extracted" that non-trivial core infrastructure of defining and running durable workflows into an Elixir package. Journey made it easy for me to quickly build and run resilient, scalable applications, with persistence – no cloud services to buy, no additional infrastructure to deploy.

Q: Is Journey used in production?

A: Yes! I am currently using Journey in a few production systems. Unfortunately, none of them are open-source, but JourDash is a fun open-source Journey-based food delivery example application to play with. See /docs (opens in a new window) for the link.

If you are using Journey in production or just playing with it, I'd love to hear from you!

Q: I like not having to worry about scalability and persistence, but my application just doesn't look like a graph.

A: Some applications don't lend themselves to the workflow / graph model. That said, here are a couple of thoughts:

It takes a bit of a mental shift to start modeling things as graphs, whose nodes are data points, some collected (e.g. a customer's name) and some computed (e.g. credit score), but that model is also surprisingly powerful, and applicable to a surprisingly large number of things.

An application doesn't need to look like a graph, or be particularly complex to benefit. Journey provides durable workflows as a package, but it can also be thought of as a NoSQL store, where some of the executions' records' values are set and some are computed with reactivity, and this is a powerful model, and a useful tool.

Q: This is neat. Do you have a Rust (Python, ...) version of this?

A: Journey is currently only available in Elixir, but if you are interested in a different language, please let me know.

Q: I have more questions, or a suggestion, or I need help with Journey. How do I contact you?

A: Send me a message!