Per Aspera Ad Astra
Since 2013 I’ve just written a single blog post on my original blog. It’s crazy how time flies, especially when you’re past the 30 line. When I wrote the last post I just recently had become a dad and was still unaware on how all of this would change my life (for the better). Time was short, focus was somewhere else and honestly I also didn’t think I had a good story or topic to talk about.
All of this kinda changed when I became responsible for a little, then still unnamed project at the end of 2016 that attempted to introduce a new piece of technology into the system landscape at XING: GraphQL.
At the time GraphQL was still fairly new and certainly not such a hot topic as it is today.
It was just me in the beginning. Not a single line of code was yet written. No clue what
programming language we would use. All I knew back then was what I wanted to achieve and that GraphQL could be an important piece to the puzzle to get there. And one suspicion: That the organizational impact of GraphQL might be on a different scale, compared to other technologies I had used before.
Today more than 45 engineers have contributed to XING One, our GraphQL to REST proxy. It’s not yet powering all of our products but some of the more important ones. It’s also on the verge of becoming “the way to build things” at XING.
One thing I’m especially proud of is that the core team that leads the effort is still just 4 t-shaped (maybe even tree shaped) people. In times where some companies hire specialists in every imaginable form, where (super)large teams are the norm and the industry successfully managed to completely derail the term “agile”, we did everything we needed to make our effort a success:
- aligning stakeholders
- analyzing risks and developing counter measures
- doing extensive project communication and marketing (internal blogs & screencasts)
- building extensive documentation
- creating an on-boarding program for new colleagues and running workshops
- developing a new scheme for rolling out this technology within our company
- and last but not least, writing every line of code to turn the idea into reality.
Did we get everything right? Of course not. Did we make a lot of mistakes along the way? You bet we did, but we set ourselves up so that we could recover and improve along the way. Did everything play out as we planned? Certainly not. Are we done? Also nope, we’re still at it ~1,5 years later.
In this series I’m trying to recapture the (what I think) most important aspects of our effort. By nature some parts are going to be more organizational and process oriented, while other parts are going to be deeply technical. I’m trying to touch all the important learnings. This post will also contain the table of contents, which will be updated whenever new content will be available.
I hope you folks enjoy the ride as much as I did!
Best, Björn
Table of Contents
- What made us interested in GraphQL
- Kickstarting the project
- Choosing the right technology
- The initial game plan
- On agile codebases
- Interlude: Our GraphQL learnings and observations
- The game has changed
- GraphQL meet lighthouse project, lighthouse project meet GraphQL
- Wait, are you saying I can’t use the status code anymore for checking for errors?
- Set it on fire
- GraphQL in a traditional application performance monitoring tool
- Context aware scalars
- Don’t ever, ever, ever use the JSON scalar
- Who the f**k put 150k metrics in the last minutes into my Graphite?
- Resilience in a distributed environment
- Help, we need to upload some images
- Documentation first, instead of an afterthought
- Getting crazy with SDL
- The first GraphQL workshops
- Federated team structures aka building a community
- First field test for pure SDL schemas
- Managing WIP and variability
- Doing an internal private beta
- On managing risk, part 2
- Supercharging SDL
- Fixing the SDL development workflow
- Cashing with Varnish
- Team, this is Apollo!
- Our mutation semantics suck
- Delegating epic level priority to the organisation
- Metrics and alerts, part 2
- Limitations of federated structures
- Improving image uploads
- Beyond the private beta
… and probably some other topics