How Relay Enables Optimal Data Fetching

At my day job I work on an open-source GraphQL client called Relay. It encourages a unique approach to application development which allows you to achieve optimal outcomes across a number of dimensions which, in other architectures, are competing trade-offs.

Unfortunately, people who are unfamiliar with the Relay have a hard time understanding these benefits. People who have used relay at Meta or elsewhere and understand the step-function value it can provide, often evangelize it when they join a new organization. But, it‘s hard to explain and those were unfamiliar with Relay often have a hard time understanding what makes it so special.

So, I tried to clearly and tersely articulate the unique value that Relay provides in a blog post on our blog:

https://relay.dev/blog/2023/10/24/how-relay-enables-optimal-data-fetching/

While I believe strongly in Relay as a library, my real hope is that core ideas in Relay could be understood more broadly and adopted by other libraries and frameworks.