Apollo GraphQL with Geoff Schmidt

GraphQL has become a core piece of infrastructure for many software applications. GraphQL is used to make requests that are structured as GraphQL queries and responded to through a GraphQL server. The GraphQL server processes the query and fetches the response from the necessary databases, APIs, and backend services.

Around 2016, when GraphQL was becoming popular, a company called Meteor was deciding what to do with its business. Meteor was started off of the popular framework MeteorJS, a system for building real-time JavaScript applications. MeteorJS was loved by many developers, but Meteor needed to decide if it was the most viable opportunity that it could be pursuing with its resources. 

From the vantage point within the Meteor company, there were some trends in the frontend ecosystem that were potentially disruptive to the viability of Meteor. There were also some large potential opportunities. The dramatic change to the frontend was largely coming as a downstream effect of Facebook’s open source technologies: React and GraphQL. Amidst these changes, Meteor shifted the company’s efforts entirely towards GraphQL and renamed the company Apollo. 

Geoff Schmidt is the CEO of Apollo, and he joins the show to talk about the GraphQL ecosystem, the business opportunities around GraphQL, and the process of pivoting from Meteor to Apollo.

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Transcript

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