Hubql

Building software today has become increasingly faster than just a few years or even a few months ago thanks to 3 major developments the rise of developer tooling, no/low code movement and integrations.

In past years and especially months, we have seen an increasing number of developer tooling being available to engineers to make their life easier, more efficient and enable them to implement functionality at even greater speeds.

Many of the tools are available for free as open source or partially as commercial open-source with additional tooling and time saving for paid or managed services.

These tools are available across different layers or roles of today’s software, from data, UI, business logic, deployment and operations to serve not only developers but also related roles.

Designers and UI Engineers can use Figma, Storybook or Tailwind to speed up their work and feedback loop.

Engineers can use AI e.g. GitHub Copilot or other tools to increase their velocity alongside many other tools that help to reduce manual work and automate repetitive or annoying routines.

Tools speed up implementation but not development process

Many of these tools enabled engineers to increase their speed. Still, at the same time, the tooling is very fragmented, especially open-source tooling typically solves just one problem at a time. Engineers end up with a multitude of tools (higher quantity) and increased complexity or learning curve for newcomers to understand the tool stack.

In today’s bear market economy, companies are increasingly looking for optimization and efficiency rather than adding more resources or tools with increasing costs.

While speed and accessibility to tools have improved, development velocity is now much more dependent on collaboration and the development process itself such as unblocking developer to gather feedback and business requirements.

Even though we have automation or AI to help us with the implementation, we still need to know what to build and understand what the right solution is.

In recent years, developer tooling has exploded in size and VC funding. We have also seen a movement to enable employees other than engineers to contribute, build and launch applications.

This has been mainly enabled by no or low code tooling becoming available for software stakeholders, marketing teams and other teams to build and maintain their own applications.

Many no-code tools are helpful for building proof of concepts, internal applications or non-critical software with lower requirements for flexibility or scalability.

Sadly some of the tools or applications built later will end up in engineers hands to be extended or transformed into actual applications at later stage when requirements can no longer be covered with the abstracted functionality in these tools creating noise and distraction in engineering teams.

This can be worse with low-code tools where pre-mature abstraction or fuzzy logic will have to be redone at sunk cost or often higher expense with the exact effects of build vs buy in some cases.

Both no code as well as low code tooling are excellent to speed up initially but also do not solve the challenge of building software faster as a cross-functional team.

Any software today, especially when starting as a startup or SaaS development, will be sped up by integrating existing libraries or APIs that solve everyday problems when building software, such as authentication, payments, and e-commerce functionality, to name a few.

Also, software is increasingly dependent on integrations with other systems to either send and share data across to other systems for reporting purposes or cross-team communication. None of the software vendors today even builds just one product but many applications for each use-case that are either well integrated or packaged together, but they are hardly enough to cover today’s business workflow hence the need to integrate with other systems and vendors.

As a result success of today’s SaaS heavily depends on integration capabilities, i.e. enabling users to connect to other systems (iPaaS) and proper APIs for their service, which stops many companies from scaling or onboarding larger customers.

iPaas systems are becoming increasingly available and common. Still, they often solve only integration pain points for publicly available APIs and common system integrations but sometimes fail to cover custom integrations, business logic and end up writing the gap between no-code, low-code and engineers writing custom integrations for internal or undocumented systems.

Good APIs today are scarce, and honestly, there is probably only a handful APIs that come to engineers mind that have really solved the pain points of both engineers and stakeholders with true API-first products being available for full satisfaction, such as Stripe, GitHub or Slack but the vast majority today either has an API but not well-documented, maintained, outdated technology or hard to use or worse not publicly available or not available at all.

Engineers are stuck today diving into outdated documentation, confused by weird API choices or waiting for support request to clarify fields or business logic in APIs to be integrated with.

In short, even software depends heavily on integrations and 3rd parties today. Neither are companies up to speed to this requirement neither is there mature tooling available for companies to adapt this trend quickly.

All three trends (developer tooling, no/low-code, integrations) are useful developments to simplify software development and its accessibility across departments beyond engineering but collaboration in software has not improved or maybe even become more difficult with these developments.

A lot of challenges for engineers remain unsolved and problems or blockers for engineers to be actually or to become significantly more efficient have not been addressed yet.

At Hubql we want to solve these problems to help teams build software together.

Engineers today spend a lot of time on non-productive work or loose time today

All of these problems are hardly solved with tooling today and/or cannot be solve with just process but requires applications to solve them.

Even collaboration within engineering such as during code review is increasingly slow to grasp implementation details, the impact of changes and the lack of automation in this area.

The same applies to non-technical stakeholders in software which have become the bottleneck in software development in recent years with increased speed of implementation and developer tooling.

Non-technical stakeholders need to keep up with the speed of engineers in agile development workflows by providing quick feedback and getting insights into progress by themself to unblock engineers in their flow.

The software development process is broken with a heavy load on the speed of implementation by engineers but is actually being blocked in other stages such as research (vendor APIs), requirement gathering (data mapping), data modelling (feedback, impact analysis, visualisation) and code review.

How Hubql aims to solve software development pain points

Hubql wants to address the pain points of today’s software development by providing the tools and a platform for both engineers and non-technical stakeholders to collaborate better by increasing overall development velocity.

Our platform will provide the following core features to help tech teams achieve more:

 for our technical preview today and learn more how Hubql can help you to build software together.

Building software today has become increasingly faster than just a few years or even a few months ago thanks to 3 recent major developments the rise of developer tooling, no/low code movement and integrations.

Why Hubql solves software collaboration challenges?

End of July we had the opportunity to attend CityJS 2023 in Singapore where we participated in a few workshops and the conference on the last day. It has been a great event, well-organised, lots of energy, insights and ability to re-connect with our friends in the community in Singapore.

A community event organised by the community and is a JavaScript Conference that evolved from the popularity and success of a monthly meet-up put together by 4 different JavaScript groups in London, including London JS Community, JS Monthly, Halfstack and Node User Group.”

The conference is for developers, solution architects, and other tech individuals aiming to stay in touch with the industry. CityJS aims for individuals to be updated on innovative changes around the industry and JS as an entity.‍

Their conferences are happening around the world organised by 

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Singapore is one of the many locations for CityJS with its first event in Singapore in 2022 during COVID times even has proven successful and strong interest in the Singapore JS community.

The latest edition in 2023 now after COVID has turned out really well with many excellent speakers attending including from abroad.

‍The event featured 2 full days of workshops plus a full day of conference talks in the end.

The venue at Life Long Learning Institute was almost fully seated with many attendees also from abroad including many attendees hoping over from Thailand just for the event.

Out of the many amazing talks during the event we have picked 4 talks that impressed us the most on conference day:

 kicked of the event with a lot of energy speaking about the challenges building international websites. She provided many real-world examples where projects have failed either in translations, considering language layout and punctuation. In some cases with mistakes leading to differences in missing 000 digits in other languages.

UNTestable - It's just pressing a button, how hard could it be?

 gave a wonderful talk on challenges test automation engineers face when testing user interfaces by sharing a few selected common issues she experienced in her career.

This was very insightful especially since engineers hardly think about the pain of testers or the impact of their implementation choices leading not only to accessibility issues but also testability problems along the way.

 (Creator of Vue.js) shared a phantastic presentation of the lessons learned of the migration journey to a new major version 3 for Vue.js and the impact it had on the community and the maintainers and him.

There were a lot valuable reflecting feedback and learning that can also be applied to any other library or open-source project to make releases and introduction of breaking changes easier for everyone.

We really enjoyed this session giving hands-on example and possible suggestion how to overcome these challenges which Vue.js was able to eventually.

 gave the closing keynote talk at the conference on Friday evening and it was an inspiring one.

Kyle took the approach of speaking both in past and future switching between a pre-recorded talk in today’s time and giving a talk from the future.

The talk painted a picture of a future web where local-first apps dominate over the today’s landscape of going cloud-native criticizing today’s approach of using the cloud to control data access, dependency and privacy issues that are easier to manage taking a local-first approach.

CityJS Singapore has been a really exciting conference with so many inspiring talks and also showing that also smaller communities like Singapore deserve more attention since they have equal passion for technology, so we appreciate what the team at CityJS is doing.

We are looking forward to the next events in Singapore and other places both as attendee, organizer or sponsor in the future.

CityJS 2023 in Singapore was a successful event featuring workshops and conference talks for developers and tech individuals.

CityJS Singapore 2023

In September we had the opportunity to attend GraphQLConf 2023 in San Francisco to participate in a few workshops and the two conference days.

The 2023 edition of GraphQLConf turned out to be an excellent event with many community members, all the thought-leaders, companies and many GraphQL power-users present to learn and collaborate together.‍

GraphQLConf – is the only official GraphQL conference produced by the GraphQL Foundation that brings together the global community of GraphQL developers, leaders and innovators to further the education, adoption and advancement of GraphQL implementations in the industry.

At Hubql, we are also a proud community partner as the co-organizer of the 

GraphQLConf 2023 - A vendor-neutral conference

This year’s GraphQLConf has been the first conference organized by the GraphQL Foundation (part of Linux Foundation) ensuring a vendor-neutral conference and the backing of the community.

In the 3 days of workshops, keynotes and talks from the ecosystems, GraphQLConf aims to be the forum where we bring the community together to share and learn about what’s working and where we need to innovate & collaborate to help business succeed with GraphQL.

The venue at Hyatt Regency SFO Airport was well-selected with delicious food and lots of space for attendees, 3 talk tracks and large networking/sponsorship area.‍

Out of the many amazing talks during the event we have picked a few talks that impressed us the most on conference day.

There were 3 tracks at the conference but there are 

 to catch up on all the other talks as well (we likely missed some other highlights).

Mutating Meetup with GraphQL - Annyce Davis, Meetup

 on Meetup’s journey adopting and improving their GraphQL implementation.

This has been an insightful talk giving an example of real-world usage and challenges they had using GraphQL in a team.

Real-world use cases like these help a lot to reflect and motivate to overcome your own challenges in your team and company.

Meetup’s journey adopting GraphQL was challenging to integrate with their legacy systems and get to a point of performance optimization adopting their architecture to remove unnecessary layers, improve caching and collaboration/education for the team.

The talk had a lot of nice visuals and ideas to help your team to adopt GraphQL better.‍

Dataloader 3.0 - An Alternative Algorithm to Solve N+1 Problems - Jens Neuse, WunderGraph

 which turned out to be not only encouraging but was also really fun to follow.

The talk started off with a fun game to decide whether a schema composes or not for federated graphs. Everyone in the room got to learn more about federated schemas together.

As a main theme of the topic Jens, a natural speaker, shared their approach on optimizing the data loader pattern which enabled Wundergraph to gain a lot performance with their implementation compared to current approach solving N+1 problem.

The talk feature a lot great graphics how resolution can be improved comparing current process to their new process (using breadth-first rather than depth-first) plus a comparison.

The visualizations helped to understand their approach really well plus learning more about GraphQL internals in lifecycle of requests.

GraphQL Security Vulnerabilities in the Wild - Antoine Carossio & Tristan Kalos, Escape

 in the wild by scanning hundreds of GraphQL API available.

They have found a lot of security vulnerabilities in the various APIs available with different severity and concerning implications.

The talk had a great introduction to GraphQL security and what to consider when building GraphQL APIs such as challenges in testing, recursive nature of GraphQL and complexity it introduces for auth and performance as well.

Vulnerabilities found range from allowed introspection, expose error & stack traces, brute-forcing attacks with complexity or even classic injection attacks.

Antoine and Tristan shared lots of ideas and suggestion to mitigate the found vulnerabilities which turned out to be good education for running GraphQL services to are probably often overlooked.

AI, GraphQL, and the Rise of Malleable Applications - Aleksandra Sikora, The Guild

 about AI and GraphQL sharing her ideas what a future for apps looks like using the term of malleable applications.

Malleable applications are adoptable apps that are capable to adjust to user requirements adjusting UI and hence data available to the user.

User requirements are diverse depending on their preferences, locations and other factors which means application are hardly serving the user needs with their UI and data exposed.

Aleksandra suggested that we want an app to be able to adjust starting from API layer hence GraphQL which enables us to achieve it due to its flexible nature.

Leveraging LLMs to create malleable systems still in its early stages but we can see signs of it in v0 from Vercel and also research projects in practise already.

These were just 4 of our highlights that we were able to attend in person but there were many other encouraging talks and promising announcements for the GraphQL community - here a few additional suggestion you may like:

Federation and optimization announcements

We really enjoyed the conference, not only the workshops and talks but ability to connect again with the GraphQL community in person.

The GraphQL community stands out in terms willingness to educate and always seeking improvement together.

We are looking forward to a bright future for GraphQL as more tooling is available these days with many challenges already being solved and awareness being created for problems still to be resolved in future by both community and or vendors.

At Hubql we hope to continue to make an impact in the community sharing knowledge through the GraphQL Bangkok Meetup but also provide tooling in terms visualization and collaborating helping teams to build better APIs and applications together.

See you at the next events and GraphQLConf.

Blog

GraphQLConf 2023 Highlights

CityJS Singapore 2023

Why Hubql solves software collaboration challenges?