GraphQL Heroes: Martijn Walraven

Author of Apollo for iOS

Published in

GraphQL Weekly

2 min readFeb 2, 2017

After almost two months we’re happy to share an interview with another GraphQL hero with you: Martijn Walraven. He’s the author of apollo-ios and held great talks on the future of GraphQL on iOS.

1. What was your first experience with GraphQL and what were your first thoughts?

I don’t remember exactly, but I think it started with watching talks by members of the GraphQL and Relay teams at Facebook. Those did a good job explaining why they designed it the way they did and how they were using it, so that immediately struck a chord.

2. What feature of GraphQL sold you into the GraphQL ecosystem?

I think seeing GraphiQL in action made a big impression, and then realizing what having a strong type system could mean for the API development experience.

Martijn Walraven — Author of Apollo for iOS

3. If you could add one more feature to GraphQL, what should it be?

I’m hoping we can add more than one feature 🙂 But one area I’d like to spend more time thinking about is if we can find a way to improve pagination support by adding features to the spec (e.g. a way to associate metadata with a list). The Relay connection model in particular adds a lot of overhead to a schema, and I think this really hurts the simplicity of the data model.

4. Describe the impact of GraphQL for your work in one sentence.

I work full time on GraphQL tools for mobile development at Apollo now, so it has obviously had a big impact!

5. If you are pitching the fundamentals of GraphQL, what is the first thing you try to explain?

I used to start from efficiency benefits compared to REST, so talking about only getting the data you ask for and avoiding unnecessary roundtrips. But I’ve since also started emphasizing the fact that it was designed for product developers, and fundamentally changes the dynamics between frontend and backend teams.

Thanks to Martijn Walraven for joining us in the second episode of GraphQL Heroes! Who are your GraphQL Heroes? What questions do you want to ask them? Tweet us @graphqlweekly so we can invite them in one of the coming episodes!