“Why on earth did we decide to develop our own RPC system?” is a simple and obvious question to ask, but a complex one to answer. In this talk, Dr. Robert Fink, Head of R&D at Palantir Technologies, will give a firsthand account of the development history of Palantir's polyglot RPC system, Conjure, from the first line of code to its rebirth in open-source. We discuss the rationale and design principles behind Conjure, its implementation, and the lessons learnt on the way (“self-hosting intermediate representation”, anyone?). If you are looking for a simple yet strongly-typed RPC system that works for servers and clients in Java, Go, Rust, Python, and TypeScript, maybe look no further than Conjure?