On this episode of The New Stack Makers, TC Currie is joined by Lee Byron, the developer of GraphQL at Facebook and now manager of the web engineering team at the investment app Robinhood.  He also is a founder of the GraphQL Foundation, a neutral place for the GraphQL community to support the expansion of GraphQL and surrounding ecosystems, whose launch last November was covered by The New Stack. 

Facebook’s mission when Byron joined in 2008 was to “map the social graph.” After that was complete, they moved on to new missions and GraphQL was developed in 2012 in response to the need to move Facebook onto mobile devices.  Facebook was originally designed on client-server architecture, and they clearly needed a native mobile data platform.

By 2015, the React open source community gained traction and held their first conference.  The expanding use in the open source community, said Byron, led to the necessity to rebuild GraphQL from the ground up.