Vignesh Murugesan's Blog

GraphQL



What is GraphQL

It is a specification laid out by Facebook which proposed an alternative way to query and modify data. Think of it is an as a complimentary of REST/RPC.

Now head here and read the original graphQL documentation. It will take 2-3 hours tops but is a worthy read. This will help you build some impressions on it and help contrast against mine below:


Why use GraphQL

Core advantage

Instead of defining custom backend rpc/rest endpoints for every data-shape, graphql allows you to build a more general endpoint which give frontend/mobile engineers freedom and query and play with the data. It might be less efficient, add a bit more complexity (need for things like data-loader), harder to standardize and control client-contracts for. What it looses in complexity and control, it gains in flexibility and freedom - provided your data model is worth of a graphql-ish query How to tell if my data-model graphql-ish?Are there complex relationships between your models? Is there a need …

Hello there

As a software engineer, it is important to keep updating your skillsets by learning the latest programming-elements (includes paradigms, patterns, languages, tools and frameworks). This becomes a bit easy if you already working on the cutting edge of something. Even then, it is possible to go too deep and loose breadth.

I've taken upon myself to do a tech refresher every year. The intent is to read, experiment and understand these elements by spending anywhere between 4 days to 4 weeks. The ultimate goal is: "do I know most that I need to know to build a planet-scale backend tech-stack ground up"

I'll write up my learnings in posts to help myself (and maybe others) refer it.

Here is the initial list I'm thinking about:


RedisMySQL, GraphQLAurora, Mesos, KubernetesCadence, SWSCassandra, MangoDB, NoSQL, MySQL, Spanner, S<, DynDBELKFlink, Storm, Samza, SparkHadoop HDFS, Yarn, MapReduceHive, HBaseKafka, ZookeeperNW: http, Tcp, thrift, grpc, yarpc, Terraform,…