The Meta Tool That Helped Millions

No matter how much people criticize Facebook for various reasons, one thing worth noting is its significant contributions to the open-source community, whether through React, LLaMA, or GraphQL.

In this blog, we’ll explore one such tool that Facebook developed internally in 2012 and then open-sourced for the world to use in 2015: GraphQL.

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GraphQL, which stands for Graph Query Language, transformed the way APIs were queried, simplifying processes that often became chaotic as the load of information increased..

When learning something new, I love using the Feynman technique — I’ll write a simple blog about what it is and how you can use it, but for now, we’ll apply it to understand what GraphQL is and why it exists.

If you look at all the apps you interact with, you’ll notice that nearly every time your application communicates with a backend, it’s performing CRUD operations.

Let’s take some examples:

• Reading Data: When you open Instagram, your device pings the backend and says, “Hey, I want to read the changes or posts that were made while I was away.” At its core, this is a read operation.