Amazon DynamoDB is one of the most versatile and popular services on AWS. In seconds, we can deploy a highly available, dynamically scaling key-document store with global replication, transactions, and more! However, if we modify a list attribute on a document, we need to take extra steps to achieve correctness…

Seven reasons I’m excited about .net in 2019 — It’s Portable: .net core and Mono are both battle-tested on Windows, Linux and Mac. Microsoft and .net workloads are obviously well-supported on Azure, but they’re also first-class citizens on AWS. It’s Fun: Unity has become the standard for game developers, especially for mobile, AR, and VR. …

A quick, hands-on demo — 2018 was the year I won many imaginary arguments about why a serverless WebSocket API Gateway will never work. I was wrong. Before I atone, let me explain: serverless patterns work best when state is separated from execution logic, but I argued that the two are inseparable in real-time applications…

There are two common ways to get live data from a GraphQL server: Subscriptions and Live Queries. A Subscription looks like this: subscription { eventX { selection } } A Live Query looks like this: @live query { selection } What’s the difference between Subscriptions and Live Queries? When would…

There are two common ways to get live data from a GraphQL server: Subscriptions and Live Queries. A Subscription looks like this: subscription { eventX { selection } } A Live Query looks like this: @live query { selection } What’s the difference between Subscriptions and Live Queries? When would…

Model-View-Controller (MVC) is one of the most widespread and influential patterns in software architecture. Despite rumors of MVC’s death, it remains a useful pattern to understand. …

Disclaimer: I no longer work at Facebook. These opinions are mine alone. Last month, I took some time to reflect on what I learned while building real-time APIs at Facebook. One useful technique stands out: build the null API first. Consider a null endpoint for a new HTTP API that…

In this blog post, I’ll cover the theory, implementation, and challenges of building GraphQL Subscriptions from scratch. In case you are unfamiliar with GraphQL, here’s a primer: GraphQL is a query language for APIs and a runtime for fulfilling those queries with your existing data. GraphQL was open-sourced in 2015, and…

When most people talk about GraphQL, they cite advantages in performance, predictable response format, type system, and versioning. All of these are awesome features, but I’d like to highlight another area where GraphQL shines: domain modeling. Domain models capture concepts and processes for a specific business domain (ex: air travel…