I was interviewed for People of GraphQL
Presenting implementation-first GraphQL at GraphQL Conf 2025. Photo via People of GraphQL.
I was interviewed for People of GraphQL, a series of profiles of folks in the GraphQL community. The piece is called The Complexity Has to Pay Off.
Back in August I sat down with Jem Gillam for a long, meandering conversation about how I ended up working on Relay and the ideas I've been chewing on ever since. Jem did a remarkable job of turning my interview ramblings into a, highly readable narrative. Reading it back, I almost sound like I know what I'm talking about! Thank you, Jem.
It covers many of the topics I've written and spoken about here:
How baffled I was by GraphQL and Relay when I first joined Facebook, and the moment I realized: "Wait, this is the interesting part!"
Data colocation with fragments, and why I'm not sure what GraphQL is buying you if you aren't using them. (See The Big Ideas in Relay.)
Where semantic nullability came from
How Grats started as a proof of concept for a Relay Resolvers API, and why I coined the term implementation-first GraphQL
Where GraphQL fits relative to React Server Components
As a bonus, the piece includes a photo of me singing Angelotti in Pocket Opera's 2023 production of Puccini's Tosca.
https://people.graphql.org/stories/the-complexity-has-to-pay-off/