Just over a year ago we launched the first user-facing GraphQL queries at Twitter. It was the “who am I?” query that, perhaps unsurprisingly, TweetDeck was making as it launched.
12 months later, or thereabouts, we’re doing upward of 2 billion queries every day. This fact still shocks me, but gives me some pride too.
I recently wrote an internal annoucement email, telling the company what we’d done. One paragraph said:
Moving clients away from this endpoint saves our user’s data — as much as 25% per request — and is the beginning of a larger architectural change to enable teams to move faster, make changes to the product more easily, and involve fewer teams in the process.
Sameer Sundresh, from our excellent Engineering Effectiveness team, responded with some searching questions: how is it going? What have I (or we) learned? Are there lessons for others trying to make such pervasive changes?
From my point of view, it’s been a mixed bag — I think with such a large, ambitious change like this we were always going to run into roadblocks and challenges. But our customers seem happy and want to increase adoption & scope.
I don’t think I can yet articulate exactly what we’ve learned — I guess it will take some time to clarify with hindsight. That said, we’ve already noticed and adjusted our approach to “breaking” changes — initially we were very hesitant and inclined to plan gradual migrations, but we’ve latterly become more comfortable with a small breakage that is correctable quickly with a bit of human intervention and a helpful error message.
I’ve also learned quite a bit about managing expectations (upwards/outwards) and doubling my (already doubled) estimates!
There were also problems we had anticipated dealing with but that hit us a bit sooner than we expected, mostly operational. All stuff that sat at the intersection of two services — the kind of thing for which neither team had obvious responsibility.
Next time: call these things out louder and don’t shy away from asking the obvious questions.
I’m looking forward to reporting what we’ve learned in another 6 months or a year. As my annoucenment email finished:
We’re just getting started.