Lessons from the GraphQL Documentary: Never Underestimate the Power of Open Source Communities

Honeypot, a tech-focused job platform based in Europe, has produced a documentary that offers a fascinating look at the origins of GraphQL. The 28-minute video explores how quickly the project began to have an impact on the wider tech industry after Facebook publicly released it as an open source project.

GraphQL co-founder Nick Schrock, who was interviewed along with fellow co-creators Lee Byron and Dan Schafer, said the documentary “captured both the urgency and joy of the early months of the GraphQL.” It was filmed over two months in San Francisco and Berlin, where Honeypot runs the GraphQL Conf in cooperation with Prisma.

GraphQL began as an internal project at Facebook that was born out of necessity as the tech industry began to shift towards providing better mobile experiences for users. At that time, Facebook’s native apps were just a thin wrapper around the mobile website.

“The inability of a large technology company to adjust to a technology shift as big as the mobile shift is the type of thing that will consign a seemingly unstoppable empire to the grave in a matter of a few years,” Schrock said.

Facebook decided to re-write the Facebook iOS app but the APIs they had at that time were inadequate for creating the Newsfeed. A new Newsfeed API was written simultaneously to be used with the new mobile app. Facebook for iOS 5.0, released in 2012, was a native re-write of the app and also the first time GraphQL was deployed in the wild. Following that release, its use was expanded beyond just the Newsfeed to encompass most of the functionality offered in Facebook’s iOS app.

Facebook shared GraphQL with the world at React Europe 2015 and published the GraphQL spec later in 2015. They explained that their goal was to design what they thought was the ideal API for frontend developers and work backwards with the technology.

GraphQL’s creators were surprised at how fast the uptake was after making the project public. Engineers at Airbnb, Twitter, and Github were early adopters and their experiences are shared in the documentary with interviews from the community. The problems GraphQL’s creators encountered in scaling their mobile experience were not specific to Facebook. Other companies had similar problems and the demand for GraphQL in the industry was already there. Within six months, the team saw implementations of GraphQL in many of the major programming languages. They realized how important the project was to the industry after GitHub announced in 2016 that its public API would be a GraphQL API:

Using GraphQL on the frontend and backend eliminates the gap between what we release and what you can consume. We really look forward to making more of these simultaneous releases. GraphQL represents a massive leap forward for API development. Type safety, introspection, generated documentation, and predictable responses benefit both the maintainers and consumers of our platform.

The documentary tells the story of how GraphQL began the first three years as a solution to internal problems at Facebook but expanded to become a community tool that was initially adopted by hobbyists and then incorporated into the products of large tech companies. GraphQL co-founder Lee Byron predicts that the project is entering the next phase of its life and “heading towards becoming an industry standard and one that’s collaborative.”

There’s no way to measure the number of APIs that are being built around GraphQL, but the query language is now used in both internal and external APIs at major companies like Pinterest, Intuit, Coursera, Walmart, Shopify, PayPal, KLM, NBC News Digital, Credit Karma, Wayfair, and Yelp. Since it can be used in combination with REST APIs, GraphQL’s rapid adoption is not necessarily a good predictor for the end of REST architecture, but it’s a trend that is worth following. This widespread adoption began with just a handful of engineers who saw GraphQL’s promise at React Europe 2015, built tools to optimize development, and advocated for using GraphQL at their companies.

“I totally underestimated the power of these open source communities,” Schrock said. “We had to rely on this community of poeple to form spontaneously and then build implementations of this in different languages and then actually productionize it and build an entire tool ecosystem around it. I didn’t think that was ever going to work, and I was totally wrong. If an idea makes sense to people and it clicks with their mind and they can see the vision, they are actually willing to do a lot of work in order to see it executed and share their work, and it’s a pretty remarkable thing to see.”

The energy in the GraphQL documentary is inspiring and the story shares many parallels with other open source projects that have gained widespread adoption through passionate communities. Check out the full documentary below: