Rethinking GraphQL Frontends with Robert Balicki

A challenge in modern front end application design is efficiently fetching and managing GraphQL data while keeping UI components responsive and maintainable. Developers often face issues like over fetching, under fetching, and handling complex query dependencies, which can lead to performance bottlenecks and increased development effort. Relay is a JavaScript framework developed by Meta for managing GraphQL data and React applications. It's designed to optimize data fetching by co locating queries with components, ensuring that each part of the UI declares its own data dependencies. Robert Balicki was on the Relay team at Meta and is now a staff software engineer at Pinterest. He is currently developing Isograph, which provides a declarative and type safe approach to data fetching. Robert joins the show to talk about challenges and solutions for managing data in front end applications. Gregor Vand is a CTO and founder, currently working at the intersection of communication, security, and AI, and is based in Singapore. His latest venture, wintik.ai, reimagines what email can be in the AI era. For more on Gregor, find him at van.hk or on LinkedIn. Hi, Robert. Welcome to Software Engineering Daily. Hi. Thank you for having me. This is actually quite exciting for me. For many years, as I was getting started as a engineer, I listened to almost every single episode of this podcast, so this is quite meaningful for me. Awesome. It's really nice to hear that. I think we also got quite a few listeners that are probably in the same position, but not many do then end up getting to come on the podcast. So great to have you here. We're gonna be talking all about your project, Isograph, which we'll get into shortly. As usual, we'd like to sort of hear just a bit about who you are and what's led you on this journey to building Isograph. It's a lot around GraphQL. You're currently working at Pinterest. What's gonna be in your path in software engineering? Yeah. So I think the most relevant thing to the Isograph story is that before this, I was at Meta where I worked on the Relay team. And under the hood, Isograph and Relay are very similar frameworks. They're both frameworks for building data driven apps that are powered by GraphQL data. And now I'm at Pinterest helping them adopt Relay. So I think that fits quite well. But just taking sort of a step back, I think you can kind of look back with hindsight and see a lot of connections to some of the stuff I was working on beforehand. Before one of my side projects was a project called Smithy, which is a framework for building web apps that where you write Rust and it sort of looks like React. And before that, one of my projects at work was building a configuration driven framework for going through flows. And so one way or the other, I sort of want to help people build UIs where they …