BrikL's GraphQL journey started in 2016 with constantly changing business requirements towards finding the product market fit. The talk will share some insights on the journey and lessons learnt of a startup using GraphQL to enable high development velocity and how BrikL is using GraphQL today.

1. BrikL
A GraphQL Native
Tobias Meixner
Co-Founder & CTO
Brikl Ltd - www.brikl.io
12 April 2019

2. Agenda
2
▪ Startup Life
▪ BrikL GraphQL Journey
▪ Our GraphQL Stack

3. Tobias Meixner
3
▪ Born in Berlin
(born before it was cool)
▪ In Asia for over 6 years
▪ Based in Bangkok
& Guangzhou
▪ Co-Founder & CTO @
▪ @MeixnerTobias

4. Startup Life
Developing software on fire

5. 5

6. 6
Actually it is ... most of the time...

7. What is a startup?
7
▪ Focus on growth
▪ Solve a problem
▪ More questions than answers
▪ Find product/market fit

8. 8
Startup Valley of Death
Source: Osawa and Miyazaki, 2006

9. 9 Source: https://www.leadingagile.com/2017/11/planning-technical-debt/
Leverage
▪ Incur intentionally
for a purpose
▪ Useful when
cost-effective
Waste
▪ Sloppy coding
▪ Refactoring has no
immediate benefit
Technical Debt

10. Dev in Startup...
10
▪ Move fast, break
things?
▪ Delete more than you
add?
▪ Crave for stability and
a constant?

11. BrikL constants since 2016
11

12. BrikL & GraphQL
Journey with GraphQL as constant

13. About BrikL
13
▪ 2D & 3D
Design studio
▪ E-commerce
Platform for
Custom-Made
Products
▪ www.brikl.io

14. Why GraphQL
14
▪ Pure focus on Frontend development
▫ MVP-style / UI-Driven development
▪ GraphQL Schema as major constant in our
development
▪ GraphQL Schema as discussion base
between project shareholders

15. MVP (2016)
15
▪ React
▪ Redux
▪ graphql-js
▪ AWS Lambda (NodeJS)
▪ Amazon DynamoDB
Based on:
serverless/serverless-graphql

16. v1 (2017)
16
▪ React
▪ Redux Apollo Client
▪ graphql-js Apollo Server
▪ AWS Lambda (NodeJS)
▪ Amazon DynamoDB

17. BrikL GraphQL Stack
“Serverless GraphQL”

18. 2018 - Today
18
▪ React
▪ Apollo Client
▪ Apollo Server
▪ AWS Lambda (NodeJS)
▪ Amazon DynamoDB
▪ + Gatsby
▪ + Apollo Engine
▪ + Elasticsearch
▪ + Tooling:
▫ Serverless framework
▫ Cypress
▫ Sentry
▫ Netlify + CircleCI
▫ AWS stuff

19. Architecture
19
▪ Serverless from Day 1
▪ Managed Services where possible
▪ GraphQL as thin layer
▪ DynamoDB to
▫ Store “State”
▫ Emit events to streams
▫ Similar to Hasura 3factor app

20. Architecture
20
CDN
Engine
Server
DynamoDB S3
Glue
Elasticsearch
ETL
Stream
Cognito
JWT Authn/z
X-Ray Logs
ClientGatsby API
Real
time

21. Gatsby
21
▪ Source data from GraphQL
▪ Generate storefront pages
▪ Source data based on
selected store integrations
▫ Instagram, …
▪ Future > Content Mesh

22. Apollo Client
22
▪ Query, Mutation components
▪ In-Memory-Cache
▪ Link Context > JWT
▪ Error link > Sentry
▪ HTTP Link > CDN vs POST
▪ SSR in Gatsby

23. Apollo Server
23
▪ Apollo Server Lambda
▪ Apollo Engine
▪ Context > User, Config
▪ Cache Control > CDN
▪ graphql-shield > Authz
▪ graphql-tools > make Schema

24. Schema directives
24
▪ Authorization
▪ Formatting
▪ Validation
▪ Data sourcing & ORM
@makeSthAwesome

25. Schema-first
25
▪ Great fit for getting started
▪ High velocity for startups
▪ Schema directives to rescue
▫ Schema = ORM
▫ SchemaDirectiveVisitor

26. Schema directives @ BrikL
26
▪ S3
▪ DynamoDB
▪ Elasticsearch

27. S3 directive
27

28. DynamoDB directive
28

29. What’s next?
29
▪ Typescript / Code-first?
▪ State Management
▪ publish DynamoDB Datasource library
▪ Subscriptions...

30. Thank you
Questions?
Find me at the speaker hours ~5pm
See you in