Moderator - Uri Goldshtein
Panelists:
Lee Byron
Sasha Solomon
Benjie
Brielle Harrison
The GraphQL Working Group is a virtual space where developers and stakeholders discuss the development of GraphQL. It meets monthly to address and solve problems collaboratively, and these discussions often lead to enhancements in the GraphQL specification. The group plays a vital role in ensuring the GraphQL technology evolves in a way that benefits all users and aligns with the broader community's needs.
Key members include Brielle Harrison from PayPal, Benji who maintains PostGraphQL, Lee Byron, a co-creator of GraphQL and engineering manager at Robinhood, and Sasha Salmon, a staff software engineer at Twitter. All contribute significantly to the direction and development of GraphQL.
The GraphQL Working Group is a broader group that includes anyone interested in the development of GraphQL and meets to discuss ongoing issues and development. The Technical Steering Committee, on the other hand, is a smaller group with formal voting rights on technical decisions and plays a key role in steering the project's technical direction.
GraphQL began inside Facebook in 2012 as a 'crazy idea' aimed at improving data fetching and server-client interactions. It was initially developed through internal reviews and code contributions. By 2015, Facebook decided to open-source GraphQL, which included significant changes to its syntax and proposals, thus broadening its development and adoption.
Individuals interested in participating can add themselves to the agenda of the upcoming GraphQL Working Group meeting by contributing a pull request or joining the discussion in the group's GitHub repository. The community encourages active participation and engagement in discussions.
Recent topics of interest include client-controlled nullability, which allows clients more control over data requirements, and GraphQL fragment arguments, which enhance the flexibility of data requirement specifications within queries. These developments aim to refine and extend GraphQL's capabilities to better meet user needs.
Thanks for having us here. I'm really excited for this panel discussion. Let me introduce some amazing panelists. First, Brielle Harrison, Senior Principal Manager at PayPal, with extensive experience in GraphQL. Benji, a community-founded open-source developer and maintainer of PostGraphL. Lee Byron, co-creator of GraphQL and Director of the GraphQL Foundation. Sasha Salmon, staff software engineer and co-tech lead at Twitter. Now, let's dive into the topic of the GraphQL Working Group and why it is essential. The Working Group is a virtual room where people meet monthly to discuss the development of GraphQL. It has played a significant role in shaping the GraphQL spec and the software that people use. The project started in 2012, with code review being the primary working model. As the project progressed, proposals and pull requests became essential. The transition to open source brought new challenges and opportunities for collaboration.
Thanks for having us here. I'm really excited for this panel discussion, I think the subject is really interesting and something that should be highlighted more and it's really important, so I'm really excited for the opportunity.
I'll introduce some of the amazing panelists that I have here today that I hope to talk as much or less as I can and give them the stage. First of all, Brielle Harrison is a Senior Principal Manager at PayPal and has been working with GraphQL since she worked as an engineer at Facebook back in 2013 until 2015. She also serves on the GraphQL Technical Steering Committee. We have Benji, he's a community-founded open-source developer, maintainer of PostGraphL and a member of the GraphQL Technical Steering Committee. Lee Byron is one of the co-creators of GraphQL and the Director of the GraphQL Foundation as well as an engineering manager at Robinhood, and Sasha Salmon, she's a staff software engineer and co-tech lead at the platform team at Twitter. She also serves at the Technical Steering Committee and the GraphQL Foundation. So a lot of amazing people here and we have a lot to talk about.
So maybe let's start with maybe a basic question, but I think a very interesting one, which is, what is actually the GraphQL Working Group and why do we actually need it? Anyone wants to take that first? I can kick this one off.
So Working Group, what is it, why do we need it, where did it come from? The Working Group and the Technical Steering Committee are actually two related, but different things. So the Working Group is a room, a virtual room, just kind of like this one, where a bunch of people who care about how GraphQL develops over time get to meet once a month and talk about what they're working on. We try to make progress, and we work through problems together, and ultimately a lot of those problems get merged into the GraphQL spec and get reflected back out in a lot of the software that all of you get to use. But that's not the model that all open source projects use. It's certainly not the model that all projects use, and so it was not obvious that we would need this thing. So I think it's maybe a little helpful to just hear a little bit of the history of the project, maybe through the lens of how it gets worked on rather than what it is. So GraphQL was started in 2012, and it was just kind of a crazy idea at that point. So the working form there was like a couple of people writing pull requests, or Facebook we called them diffs, and code review. So most of the actual work happened via code review, and that was the working model for about three years, as it probably is for many of you, all of the work that you do day to day in your jobs. We were getting ready to open source GraphQL in 2015, and in the process of that, made some fairly significant changes. And the way we talked about those changes was as proposals. So I would write a proposal to change the syntax in some significant way. I would write a document, and then I would hand that to my coworkers, and they would give me feedback. You might do this as design docs with your team. If you're going to make a big change to a project that you work on, you want to write down what you want to do before you do it so you can get good feedback. And that was kind of my mental model at the time. And I wasn't the only one writing proposals. We did that and then as we open sourced, we had this phase shift where now people were writing pull requests to us, we had all the code up on GitHub. So we would get these pull requests, add some crazy feature to GraphQL, please review my diff, and were like, woah. We had already progressed from, please review my diff in 2012, three years ago, to design docs with formal review internally, this was an important internal project for us that we were now making publicly available.
Excited for panel discussion. Introducing panelists including Brielle Harrison, Benji, Lee Byron, and Sasha Salmon. They have significant experience in GraphQL. Discussion to follow.
Thanks for having us here, and I'm really excited for this panel discussion. I think the subject is really interesting and something that should be highlighted more, and it's really important. So I'm really excited for the opportunity. I'll introduce some of the amazing panelists that I have here today, that I hope to talk as much or less as I can and give them the stage. First of all, Brielle Harrison is a Senior Principal Manager at PayPal and has been working with GraphQL since she worked as an engineer at Facebook back in 2013 until 2015. She also serves on the GraphQL Technical Steering Committee. We have Benji, is a community-founded open source developer, maintainer of PostGraphQL and a member of the GraphQL Technical Steering Committee. Lee Byron is one of the co-creators of GraphQL and the director of the GraphQL Foundation, as well as an engineering manager at Robinhood. And Sasha Salmon, she's a staff software engineer and co-tech lead of the platform team at Twitter. She also serves at the Technical Steering Committee and the GraphQL Foundation. So a lot of amazing people here and we have a lot to talk about.
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