[cryptica]

Part of me thinks that if Apollo was a good company, they wouldn't need to keep raising this kind of funding by now. There are plenty of alternatives which burned a fraction of what Meteor/Apollo has burned to build this. They're taking funding and attention away from other more deserving projects.

[hwillson]

Just to clear this up a bit; Apollo doesn't "need to keep raising this kind of funding". Both Meteor and Apollo have been making money. What's really happening here is that both Apollo and its amazing supporters/investors have witnessed first hand the impact that data graph based technology can have on the lives of developers and the productivity (and bottom line) of companies. To help take all of this further, we've decided now is the time to bring more people on board, so we're substantially growing our team (hence the extra dollars).

> They're taking funding and attention away from other more deserving projects.

I've gotta say, I completely disagree with this statement. Meteor and Apollo have both helped thousands of developers do amazing things, for free. Yes, I work for Apollo, but I'll detach for a sec; I can't think of any open source software company on the planet that deserves this more than they do. I can tell you first hand that Apollo cares deeply about open source software (OSS culture is ingrained into the company right from the top), and goes to great lengths to make developers happy and provide ways for developers to use a large portion of the things it builds for free - no strings attached. When I encounter other companies that act like this, I instantly think they should get anything they need to help themselves flourish and thrive - Apollo is no different.

[cryptica]

>> What's really happening here is that both Apollo and its amazing supporters/investors have witnessed first hand the impact that data graph based technology can have on the lives of developers and the productivity (and bottom line) of companies

It's just a bunch of wealthy people using their money to force their opinions about software development onto as many developers as possible...

I can guarantee that there exists simpler solutions outside of the GraphQL bubble that far exceed what can be achieved with Apollo in terms of both flexibility and productivity. I could share some links if you are genuinely interested.

[JMTQp8lwXL]

> [W]itnessed first hand the impact that data graph based technology can have on the lives of developers and the productivity (and bottom line) of companies

Have you quantified this? I'd be curious to see how much productive companies are using GraphQL when compared to creating, e.g., generic REST API's.

[JMTQp8lwXL]

The danger with external funding is forced growth before the platform is ready to be monetized.

[hwillson]

Actually, this isn't a worry for Apollo. We've been growing and monetizing for a while, and our partners are an amazing group of people who get what we do. They aren't forcing us to do anything.

[JMTQp8lwXL]

My observation was Meteor development really slowed down when Galaxy was ramping up. That doesn't necessarily imply that investors forced anyone to do anything, but as an external observer it appeared that resources were substantially re-prioritized, whatever the reason could be. Maybe it wasn't the investors, but someone led that re-prioritization. Maybe there were things going on with Galaxy that required immediate attention, and the team only had so many engineers / devops / testers, etc. It could have been a lot of things.