Stack Magic with GraphQL — FSE Meetup, Nov ‘18
This month the Full Stack Engineering Meetup group hosted the inaugural event at Greenhouse’s new offices — Stack Magic with GraphQL! Both of our speakers presented their work with GraphQL. Here are speaker intros and quick abstracts they provided for their presentations…
Drew Brien, Senior Software Engineer @ Greenhouse
Title: Resource Limitations in GraphQL: Trials and Tribulations
Drew is a Senior Software Engineer working on APIs at Greenhouse Software. A Boston native, Drew moved to NYC about 7 years back and has been working in software since. He enjoys snowboarding and watching Boston sports teams collect trophies.
Talk Abstract: Drew will be discussing the concept of resource limitations in GraphQL APIs. While building the GraphQL API for Greenhouse’s Onboarding product, the Engineering team had to find a solution to the following problem: how do you prevent consumers from overwhelming the API infrastructure? While most REST APIs solve this issue by implementing a standard rate-limiting algorithm, this approach isn’t sufficient to protect GraphQL APIs. We will chat about how REST and GraphQL APIs differ in this regard, and we will compare a few solutions that we considered.
Tanmai Gopal, Co-Founder @ Hasura
Title: Architecture of scalable and resilient NodeJS apps with GraphQL & event-driven serverless
Tanmai is the co-founder of hasura.io. He is a polyglot developer whose areas of interest and work span React, GraphQL, NodeJS, Python, Haskell, Docker, Postgres, and Kubernetes. He is passionate about making it easy to build things and is the instructor of India’s largest MOOC, imad.tech, with over 250,000 students.
Talk Abstract: The talk will cover how state of the application can be architected to be stored in the database itself and how updates to state can be used to build reactive user interfaces which update in real-time, with GraphQL Subscriptions and live-queries. We will then look at how serverless functions can be used to execute business logic and how these functions can be triggered on database events, which are updates to this state. In short it will cover the different architecture patterns, open-source tools used, code-samples, observed benefits, pros/cons, and how this pattern fits into the larger GraphQL and serverless revolution that we are undergoing.
