Birthday Week: Doubling Down

This week we’re celebrating the 1 year anniversary of our incorporation; each day we’re celebrating something, culminating with having a PostGraphile stall at FOSDEM in Brussels on Saturday and Sunday — do swing by if you’re in the area!

One year ago, I decided it was time to get serious about PostGraphile. Having worked on it as a side-project for over a year by that point, it was clear that to make development sustainable I’d have to find a way of earning a living from my work. Jem and I wanted to find a stream of income which complemented my work on PostGraphile, and enabled her to become more involved.

After much thought, we went into business together, creating a software development and training company using a portmanteau of our names: Jemjie Ltd. We were quickly successful in finding related work: helping companies to build their stack around PostGraphile in an advisory and/or development role, and a stint of GraphQL training.

As time went on, it became clear we couldn’t take on too much of this work or we would not have time left to work on PostGraphile itself. This is where our Patreon supporters made a huge difference — by funding time for us to work directly on PostGraphile, we could take a break from the consultancy work and spend time closing issues, reviewing pull requests, writing documentation, and advancing the project with new features.

Throughout the year, more and more community members stepped forward to help support the project financially and just last week we passed the $1500/mo goal allowing us to dedicate the equivalent of one day per week entirely to development on PostGraphile (and that’s not including the constant attention to GitHub issues and PRs, or supporting people via our Discord chat).

Another source of great support came in the form of sponsored development for specific PostGraphile features. These have included:

• Massively improved Lambda support thanks to better webpackability, which included decreasing bundle size by 10 times, and decreasing cold start times to under 0.5 seconds.
• Enhancements to PostGraphile’s support for PostgreSQL VIEWs and MATERIALIZED VIEWs; through adding support for defining constraints (e.g. foreign keys, primary keys, not null, etc) using smart comments
• An operation hooks plugin which enables you to add additional checks and send additional metadata back to the client when you attempt mutations — e.g. custom validation messages, authorisation checks and assertions, or even warning the user their credit card is expiring soon

In addition to thanking all our generous Patreon supporters, our thanks go out to CoGo, Ulta, and Learnlight for sponsoring the development of the features they needed, and then sharing these features with the community.

Thanks to all this support from PostGraphile users, we’ve been able to spend a lot more time on PostGraphile than we expected — I’m extremely proud of the advancements we’ve made, and am very excited for the future! PostGraphile is now in production use by many companies, with applications in industries ranging from farming to aerospace.

Reflecting on the successes of the past year, Jem and I are doubling down on our commitment to PostGraphile. We’re happy to announce that we’ve renamed our company to Graphile Ltd to reflect our focus, we’re only taking on PostGraphile related contracts, and we’ve got more announcements to come about how we intend to support increasing development time on PostGraphile.

This would not be possible without you, PostGraphile users and supporters, so a huge thank you to you all!

Join us again tomorrow for Jem on sharing our knowledge…