[jrockway]

I have not really figured out whether it's worse to turn programmers into API designers, or to force programmers to talk to each other and agree on a schedule for a feature that only benefits one half of the people talking to each other. Both are tricky.

To me, I think backend teams largely want to be left alone, while frontend teams want to make Their Thing today. So the backend teams say "sure we'll make an API" and then the frontend teams in theory never schedule PM-driven meetings with them, but can still experiment with new interaction patterns cheaply.

How this all works out in practice, I'm unsure, but highly suspicious. My personal opinion is that frontend and backend developers working on the same codebase, going to the same meetings, reviewing each other's code is probably faster and more efficient in the long run. But at some point you need 100 teams, and the "just have one team" method can't scale, so at that point, you have to accept that you can't be perfect and come up with something. GraphQL is that something.

(I would have just used SQL. Many good libraries around for parsing them into query plans that are easy to execute.)