philplckthun

> There really shouldn't be two standard package managers for JS.

I chuckled a little when I realised that npm, Yarn, Yarn 2, and pnpm can all be found alive and well in the ecosystem

I'm honestly not sure whether there's really a good excuse to invent a format that's immediately incompatible with all GraphQL tooling out there, which would need to be converted. After all, debugging and logging tools could still display these.

It also conveniently leaves out automatic persisted queries which would replace queries with hashes, or regular persisted queries, where we'd have a limited set of allowed queries on the server-side that it accepts.

I think ultimately when I think of sending GET requests for GraphQL, I'm immediately more worried about the URL length limit. The risk being that at some point in the future we may run over this limit and get into a lot of unexpected trouble.

Also, this article assumes that you can only stringify GraphQL a single way, with spaces. However a not as commonly known detail in the spec is that any commas are treated the same as whitespaces. Hence, this is a valid query:

  {item(id:4){id,name,author(id:4){id,name}}

Which isn't far off from reading a complex query string IMO, works with any existing GraphQL API via GET if the API already accepts GET requests, and isn't a special format that'll need to be learned supporting the full syntax.

There are solutions to simply turn GraphQL requests into (traditional) CDN-cacheable requests. Usually this would be done using (Automatic) Persisted Queries, where a query is not only requested as a GET request, if it's not a mutation, but it'd also do so using a hash rather than an entire query.

This has a couple of limitations that you'd also expect from a CDN cache for REST requests. However, I believe the interesting part about GraphCDN is that it can do more to look at the exact queries and mutations that are run to invalidate queries more precisely.

So, it's likely worth saying that it's not that CDN caching GraphQL is hard, but getting invalidation and a high cache hit rate (just as with REST APIs) is hard.

To be fair, since this has been a while ago it's hard to tell what to do about this. Personally I find it hard to draw any conclusions from this just due to the time that has passed. I don't use Facebook, so maybe it's just my distance from it. But it has happened and it's worth stating that this is basically a psychological experiment and not a simple A/B test, but at a company that most likely at the time didn't have an ethics board to review this.

Other sources list a couple of principles behind the ethics of psychological research. The relevant ones being:

- Minimise the risk of harm - Obtain informed consent

Some of them do state that the latter isn't always exactly possible, since that may influence the outcome.

But the fact of the matter is that Facebook did an A/B test that could inflect serious harm on the quality of life of the participants, who weren't aware of any research being conducted. The latter sounds like it'd be at least the minimum here.

So, I'm not a psychologist, but this does sound like it shouldn't have happened in this way. There were definitely more ethical ways in running this experiment that wouldn't have involved 700K unknowing and potentially unwilling participants.

For what it's worth, I believe there are plans to reactivate the Siemensbahn tracks for a new line by 2025... or so I've read? Can't quite remember.

Not to toot our own horn, but while this mentions GraphQL with Relay / Apollo as fetching clients, with urql and its normalised cache Graphcache we started approaching more of these problems.

Solving the mentioned problems in the article for best practices around fragments is on our near future roadmap, but there are some other points here that we've worked on that especially Apollo did not (yet)

Request batching is in my humble opinion not quite needed with GraphQL and especially with HTTP/2 and edge caching via persisted queries, however we have stronger guarantees around commutative application of responses from the server.

We also have optimistic updates and a lot of intuitive safe guards around how these and other updates are applied to all normalised data. They're applied in a pre-determined order and optimistic updates are applied in such a way that the optimistic/temporary data can never be mixed with "permanent" data in the cache. It also prevents races by queueing up queries that would otherwise overwrite optimistic data accidentally and defers them up until all optimistic updates are completed, which will all settle in a single batch, rather than one by one.

I find this article really interesting since it seems to summarise a lot of the efforts that we've also identified as "weaknesses" in normalised caching and GraphQL data fetching, and common problems that come up during development with data fetching clients that aren't aware of these issues.

Together with React and their (still experimental / upcoming) Suspense API it's actually rather easy to build consistent loading experiences as well. The same goes for Vue 3's Suspense boundaries too.

Edit: Also this all being said, in most cases Relay actually also does a great job on most of the criticism that the author lays out here, so if the only complaint that a reader here picks up are the DX around fragments and nothing else applies this once again shows how solid Relay can be as well.

It's not a cryptographic key or a secret of any kind. In the case of React (or other JS libraries) export identifiers are chosen to expose private APIs for integration purposes with things like developer tooling and other functionality that isn't part of the publicly documented API.

Instead of choosing something like `__PRIVATE` the React library in particular chose something more eye catching: `__SECRET_INTERNALS_DO_NOT_USE_OR_YOU_WILL_BE_FIRED`, which is definitely sure to get people's attention when they look into it, but is essentially just a joke.

We actually don't know what the usual communiqués internally at GoDaddy look like. In a vacuum we can also judge this to be an effective test. In practice there are many unknowns and factors we don't know about though. In my opinion phishing is also an issue at scale when we talk about companies; meaning, there's a likelihood that some will always be more likely to fall for it.

Given how the world has been this year and what some employees maybe have gone through the employees that will fall for this particular phishing emails may actually need more support from their employer.

Either way, this isn't a vacuum and we are talking about a test that is unnecessarily cruel.

Edit: just to make this more constructive, there are always alternatives. Instead of relying on emails only employees could be informed to check in via a second channel in all matters relating to money or a company's IP.

> Sign this thank you to let Apple know consumers are eagerly anticipating anti-tracking protection on iPhone.

I'll only sign a thank you like this when Apple allows other browsers engines on iOS, which is actual consumer-friendly behaviour towards the Web.

No worries! Snark received.

As we go up the engineering career ladder and land on more specialised roles with the necessary experience, both from a technical and managerial perspective, the funnel definitely shrinks. I won't deny that that looks different from place to place, but it's hard to deny that it will take years still for any saturation we see to take place on the higher part of the career ladder as people specialise more as they get there.

Specifically once we started looking for engineering management and principal level roles that still bring the technical expertise we'd expect the hiring pool was definitely not saturated.

> "in talent to do the job."

It's a matter of perspective as well though, so both sides are correct. "The job" here can talk about very different engineering roles and levels, which will have a different hiring pool by market and by saturation.

From my own experience running interviews, even in the same "community's" hiring pool in the same location you can expect large differences depending on what position and skill set you're hiring for at that moment.

I find it more worrying that over years I've seen that some engineers are attempting to optimise the interviewing process on their end. Obviously instead interviews should optimise to appeal to candidates and make the process equitable, quick, and accurate, without nonsense like coding challenges that don't relate to the job.