API

Parallelizing Product Development with GraphQL

What are you doing these days? 

I work at Honeycomb, improving people's access to observervability. I work on product and anything related to the product. I'll go visit customers and help them do integrations, or I will change the UI or change the way that we're doing the data fetching. Things like that.

What's the motivation for the talk?

A number of times in my career which has been very consulting heavy I've been asked to do some rewrite or very large refactor. Specifically there's one case that I can think of. We had to rewrite Docker from two separate Django applications that didn't have APIs into a universal React application. And GraphQL is a tool that can be used as a solution to a social problem which is you have these REST APIs that need to be built before the front-end is built, but you can use the GraphQL Schema Definition language to do the data model first, and the implementation of the back-end can proceed in parallel with the front-end.