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Thank you for tuning into today's full episode of the Breaking Changes podcast.

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I'm your host and chief evangelist for Postman Kin Lane.

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With Breaking Changes, we explore topics from the world of APIs, but through the lens of

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business and engineering leadership.

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Joining me today, we have Annyce Davis, vice president of engineering at Meetup.

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Annyce shared with me the best answer to why a company has adopted GraphQL that I've seen

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to date, leaving me impressed with what Meetup accomplishes with APIs.

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I always start simple, start with the basics.

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Who are you and what do you do?

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Hey, I'm Annyce Davis. I'm VP of engineering at Meetup.

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What do I do? Everything. But these days I'm primarily responsible for our GraphQL API, as well as our native applications.

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So tell us a little bit about your journey. How did you end up in this role at Meetup?

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Like where, where, where'd you get started with your career?

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Uh, yeah, great question. It started a long, long time ago.

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Um, as a little person, I used to love playing this game called number munchers.

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Um, and my teacher told me, Hey, if you want to do something like this, when you get older,

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you have to become a computer programmer. And so that was pretty much it for me.

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Um, ever since then I wanted to become a computer programmer.

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So I did, um, I studied computer engineering in college and then I started working as a

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programmer. So, um, it's been, it's been a fun ride.

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So, so tell me, I think most people are listening to the show are, are familiar with Meetup.

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I think who has, especially in the tech industry, uh, we've all had quite a bit of exposure

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to, to what, what the magic that I think you all make happen.

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So what's, what's the role of APIs at Meetup?

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Yeah. APIs are just central to everything that we do at Meetup.

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Um, as I mentioned, I'm primarily responsible for our GraphQL API.

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Keeping that performant, um, it serves all of our front facing clients.

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So if you're using like your phone, the native applications, or if you visit our website,

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um, the API powers all of that. Um, as well as we do offer, um, special API access for some customers who want to just

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query it directly themselves, um, which is another interesting use case.

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So, uh, a lot of, a lot of folks are, are aware of GraphQL.

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It's definitely, I would say one of the top, uh, types of API flavors of APIs.

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However, we want to frame it, uh, today, but what's, what's the decision making

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behind choosing GraphQL and, and, and moving from a rest infrastructure?

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Yeah, that's a great question. So I'll say like a few years ago, um, we wanted to experiment with Meetup.

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Changing some of the core business model.

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And it made sense to spin off a separate GraphQL API in order to power it.

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Um, and then over time, we just started seeing how more of our full stack

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engineers, um, even sometimes our apps engineers can contribute to the GraphQL

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API, um, mostly because of some of the simplicity that it offers via the

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resolvers, as well as on the client side, we've been able to use the API

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on the client side, we can say, well, you know what I want to now show a save

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button here, well, that's already exposed via GraphQL.

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So just add that field to your query and you're good to go.

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So that has really caused us to invest heavily in using GraphQL at Meetup and

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it's been a really great decision for us. So I think one of the things I'm seeing GraphQL adopted is, is in fairly

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large organizations, cause they have such a, uh, an expansive data graph

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that they need to, to expose. I'm curious how, how big of an organization is Meetup?

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Meetup is so small. Meetup is less than a hundred people.

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And I remember when I joined Meetup about three and a half years ago, and I started

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to learn about like the architecture and some of the functionality and it is

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deceptively complicated for an app where you say like, I just want to go to an

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event or I just want to host events.

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But we offer so much customization, so many hidden features that you don't even

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know about, um, honestly, I was just blown away by how much is actual Meetup.

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Um, and also keep in mind Meetup is 20 years old.

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So there's going to be a lot of legacy things that are still there that kind of

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get in the way of, um, some, some of the things that we want to do at Meetup.

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And so you always have to keep that portion of infrastructure or product work

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in mind as you're moving forward, um, to make changes.

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Yeah. It's a, it's a interesting just to hear that you're so small.

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Cause when we first talked, I was kind of blown away that I was just had something

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else in my head, cause y'all have been here for my entire, kind of the last phase

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of my career. And so I just assumed it was like get up, GitHub or some other company and just

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super large, um, but you're, you're in charge of engineering.

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How much of your, your day to day is business versus technical things?

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Uh, do you spend your time on? I'll say probably 20 to 30%, maybe business things and the rest is very technical.

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Um, just to give you an example, business things, negotiating contracts, meeting

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with a new vendor, uh, following up on these other kinds of things, like, uh,

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there's always a lot of administrative work that needs to be done.

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Um, and then as far as being technical, that's where I get to, um, kind of get

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in the weeds a little bit, look at some performance optimizations, learn about new

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things that are coming along and just monitoring the health of the organization.

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Um, and our platform overall.

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So how much, uh, I mean, as a technical person, how much of the business should us

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developers, uh, understand when it comes to doing APIs, do we need to be intimate

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and aware of, of how business works or, or is it all right if we just kind of stay

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in our, our little, little rabbit holes and focus on the, on the code bits?

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Yeah, I think it's good to come out every now and then and take a look around at

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what's happening, um, with the business.

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I know before as an engineer, when I was just an individual contributor, I, I

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thought I knew what was going on with the business and I would say like, why

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don't they just blink, you know, it's so obvious they should just blink.

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What are the business people doing? They don't know anything, right?

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Cause when you're a programmer, you know, everything. Um, and when you start to learn more about the business, learn about how

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does a business make money, what counts as revenue versus an expense, what's

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the difference, where are the buckets of money, how is it allocated?

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How does it impact taxes? Do you need to know about every single thing?

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No, but just knowing that there's more nuance there than you're probably aware

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of, I think it's really healthy.

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It helps you to build empathy for some of the decisions that the business makes a

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lot of times that maybe you might not fully understand or agree with.

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And I also think that it helps you as an engineer to make sure you're

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optimizing for the right things. Um, so if I can just give an example, what if my company, um, is looking to

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get rid of one aspect of our, of our project and use a third party solution.

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Would it make sense for me to spend all my time?

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Oh, let me make sure that this is redundant and I'm, I'm backing this

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thing up and it says the perfect architecture and everything is abstracted

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away or let's just make it work.

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Cause next month we're giving it off to a third party.

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Yeah, of course it would be a no brainer. So you need to know what's going on with business also to help you make

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smart decisions as an engineer. Yeah, I agree.

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And I see this divide between business and IT kind of narrowing.

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I think it still exists and we need people who are, are specialization in

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each area, but I see a lot of the classic divide closing up, but coming,

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coming back to the, the, the graph go up.

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Cause I think a lot of our audience is going to be very curious around, uh,

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they're dabbling. They they've made a decision or they've been thinking about, uh, implementing

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GraphQL what's, what's been the biggest benefit as far as having GraphQL

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in place for your, for your team. Yeah.

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So I'll say the biggest benefit is that we understand what is available.

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I mean, I know like in the past, maybe we had swagger or we'll have the rest

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CPI and, um, we were just pulling tons of, tons of data, too much data, um,

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different rest requests over the years, as I mentioned, Meetup is super old.

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So maybe there was some, some reason why we needed all of that data.

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And then we changed the UI and we don't need that data anymore.

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So on the apps, it was always so slow downloading tons of data that we didn't

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even end up displaying to the user.

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So I'll say one benefit is just performance that we only pull what we need.

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I'll say another benefit is understanding the business.

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Like this, these are the groups, the networks are comprised of groups.

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These groups have events, attendees go, attendees have this, they have tickets.

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They, this is the status. Um, I think for being so small, we can't even, we can't even, we can't even

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Um, I think for being so small, we can't afford to have, um, knowledge silos where

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only some people understand the business and know about, you know, what makes Meetup

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tick, having the GraphQL API has really helped so much where I know personally, I

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have such a much better understanding of Meetup and how the pieces fit together.

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Yeah, I like that. Cause I think that reflects what I'm seeing with a lot of groups.

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They're just trying to get a handle on that data graph, that sprawl.

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It's almost become like Los Angeles or Atlanta when it comes to like, you know,

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the neighborhoods, like it just goes on, you can get lost, you can get lost in

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those neighborhoods sometimes, where am I? How did I get here?

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Where am I going? And so I think that's a pretty good reason to, to jump in, but on the flip side,

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what, what's been some of the challenges and adopting GraphQL, what'd you say?

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I think the, I'll say one of the biggest challenges is not fully letting go of

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rest and it just takes so long to deprecate the rest API.

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So it's like, first of all, you have to make sure that you're instrumenting

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everything properly to try to nail down who's even calling it.

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And is it important enough that we don't want to break it for said person?

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So it took us a while to just get like all of our pro clients off of rest

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and onto GraphQL. Once we were able to do that, it's like, yay, victory.

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Now we have to finish getting off of it ourselves and just going through,

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okay, this team, can you make a corresponding query in the GraphQL API?

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Great. Now adopt this new query. Wonderful.

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Now wait two, three months for people to upgrade their apps and we no longer have

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to support that one endpoint. And then while this is all happening, business happens.

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You never stop building features. You never stop releasing things.

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So it's, it's difficult to justify, oh, don't build any features instead, just

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deprecate this endpoint, it will be exact same experience for you.

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It will be exact same experience for, for the customers.

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No. So it's like, it's for me, I think the biggest challenge is just completely

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being on one system and, and fully deprecating the other one.

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Yeah. It seems like it's really helping you manage change in a way that's, that's

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positive and I don't think, not that rest can't manage change in some ways, just

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knowing how to, how to manage change with rest, I think isn't a widely shared

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knowledge and everyone is on board or knows how to do it and GraphQL definitely

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kind of comes out of the box and in adapting and evolving with the different

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applications you're going to use. Yeah.

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I have definitely seen that to be the case.

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So, uh, speaking of change, what's changed during COVID for y'all?

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Yeah. Uh, so we're meet up and we were all about people meeting together in

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person, real human connections.

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And when COVID hit, we really had to make an adjustment and for the first

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time ever we introduced online events.

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And that was huge. Um, and I remember when we were initially thinking of it, everyone was like, how

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in the world can we make meetup work for online events?

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It just, there's nothing in our like schema or our database tables in the

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fields that can support this, but we were already using GraphQL.

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And so that was just like the perfect thing because, you know, it's an

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abstraction layer, so we could say, Hey, everyone start calling this new query.

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You'll get some online events data. Let's create a new mutation and then we'll call that mutation and we'll say,

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Hey, this is an online event. And the venue just happens to be in the middle of nowhere.

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Great. So we were able to sort of hack our own system using GraphQL to support online

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events and we did the whole thing in about a week, so honestly, it was so

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impressive and it's one of those make or break moments, um, in a company.

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And thankfully meetup was able to pull it off because I do strongly believe that

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it's good for humanity and it really does help people, um, do things with

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someone that has similar interests.

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So, um, really proud of us for the work that we did there.

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Yeah, it's, um, and I think, I think y'all are straddling the line between,

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we all still need to meet up and share knowledge and share information.

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We're in this weird moment where we can't get together, but then we need to go back,

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but maybe not all of us can go back to in-person and so hybrid events.

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And I think that it sounds like GraphQL is allowing you to kind of really flex

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with that and I liked the, the meetup is, is nowhere because the, the virtual

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events, I feel we, we, my team, my dev rel team and we joke, it's like screaming

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into the void, you know, because you'll be like talking sometimes and who are

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you talking to, you know, and so I like the meetup and nowhere that fits well.

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It's like, is this thing still on? It's, it's definitely, and I've done that and had, yeah, I, and I've done that

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and had like three or 400 people listening like, yeah, we're all here.

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We're listening. We're, we're, we're interested in like, oh, okay.

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Okay. Well, thank you. It's, uh, um, so how about your consumers?

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I mean, you say you're, you know, your website mobile or consumers, but how have

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your partners adapted to GraphQL?

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Are they pretty, pretty open to this change?

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Yeah. Um, so a lot of the pro customers who had to switch from REST to GraphQL, um, we

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tried to do it in a very like gradual fashion.

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So we wrote some documentation. I tried to look at the REST requests that they were making the most often, and

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then add that to the documentation as well.

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So, Hey, you want to get a list of all groups in your network?

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This is, this is the rest endpoint.

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And now this is how you do it with GraphQL. And so I will go through just based on data, look at the types of

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requests they were making and say, here's how you do it on GraphQL.

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Um, and then for a few people actually just hopped on a zoom call and said,

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okay, show me, show me your code, show me your queries.

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What are you trying to find out? Oh, okay.

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This is what you need to do. This is this sort of object.

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Um, it was very, um, high touch white glove treatment, I'll say.

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But in the end it worked out really well and they were appreciative and

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grateful that they can still query our API in a way that worked for them.

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And then also for several of the people, this was their first time working with GraphQL.

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So they were just kind of excited as well to be able to, um, try out this

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technology that is kind of taking over, um, the industry.

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Yeah. Do you, do you feel like you learn from those, those high touch engagements

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and, and learn from the consumers as well? Definitely.

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You, I, you assume that, you know, what people are doing, um, because you

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have some data, right? I can look in the dashboard and see, oh, they keep using this endpoint.

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Great. I'll just make the same exact thing in GraphQL.

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And then you meet with them and you find out actually we do these two requests.

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Then we do this and put the data together ourselves.

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And then we loop over and you're like, wait, wait, no, you don't have to do that

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with GraphQL, one query, combine this.

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And it's like, oh, nice.

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So I think for, for me, it's always just don't make assumptions.

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You, you think you know, but you don't know.

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And you have to talk to people. Um, I know I tend to be kind of shy and introverted despite the fact that I'm

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talking to you today and I'm like, Anisha, you just have to talk to people.

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You have to talk to them, find out what they're trying to do, how they're

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currently doing it and what are the pain points because people always have pain

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points just because they're doing something and maybe not complaining about it.

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Doesn't mean that it's working wonderfully for them.

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Um, so I definitely get a lot of value out of talking to, to customers and just

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finding out what are their pain points. Also, what were we missing?

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There were a few things that I didn't even know they were querying for, and we

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hadn't covered it in the graph. So I'm like, great.

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Thank you for telling me that. I'll make sure that I get prioritized so we can expose that

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information in a query for you. So yeah, definitely talking to customers.

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I learned a ton. Yeah.

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I think this has been the biggest advantage of, of API is being closer, more

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closely aligned with business and not just the classic developers in a back room

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that you feed pizza to and they, they deliver an API cause we, I get like that.

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That's why I do API is cause it, I was an old database architect and administrator

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and, and API has brought me out of that, that basement and got me closer to

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business and closer to needs. And I found that more nourishing than, than just hacking away at things.

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And I think we, we don't always realize it and we're happy being our, in our

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little cocoons, but it's actually better that we're not.

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Yeah. Because I, engineers, we solve real problems with technology.

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It's not that we're just, oh, I love GraphQL or I love REST or I

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love any particular thing. Our job is to solve a business problem using technology.

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For the most part, most people don't, the business doesn't really care.

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As long as it's not expensive. So it's, it's up to us to say, okay, well, what is the real business problem?

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And what is the tech, the right technology that will solve it?

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Yeah. Agreed. Can't agree more on that.

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And that's well said. So what keeps you coming in every day to work?

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I love my team. They're very smart and humble, which is a great combination.

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One of my favorites. And I love the mission of meetup.

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I love that we're small. It, cause I could just get to wear so many hats.

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I mean, one minute it's like, I'm debugging some performance issue in the API.

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The next minute I'm talking to the marketing team about how we're going to

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put out a new program and everything in between.

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And that's, that's really exciting for me.

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I like to have, I like it to be mixed up and I like to be able to use my creativity

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in different aspects of the business.

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And also it's a challenge. I mean, we're still a business who is trying to help people form connections.

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That's not a simple or easy problem.

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And so I look forward to trying to develop technical solutions

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to that business problem. So that definitely keeps me coming to work.

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I like it. I have to kind of second that, that I kind of owe a lot of my career right now to,

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to y'all and what meetup does. Cause like I'm an evangelist, I'm chief evangelist at Postman, but I have this

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a blog called API evangelists that I've run since 2010.

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And I've completely dependent on the meetup ecosystem in different towns and cities.

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And I used to literally live on the road and travel from Chicago to DC, to New York,

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to Atlanta, to LA and, and do meetups.

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And I'm talking, you know, these are technical meetups.

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So some of them are APIs, but some were like, you know, in DC that's like

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Smithsonian data sharing for like African-American history.

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And like, it's like 15 people that are very specialized coming together to use

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the Smithsonian API to like tell a certain set of stories, you know?

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And so it's that kind of enablement that really has given me a career and kind

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of built up all the people that I know. So that's awesome.

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I love hearing these meetup stories. It's like meetup is just even before joining, I also used meetup also very

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huge part of my tech career and growing my network and yeah, we're still here.

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We're still doing it. Yeah.

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Well, thank you for being there. Thank you for doing it.

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I love the GraphQL narrative. I think it was one of the, the, the healthiest, pragmatic views of

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GraphQL that I've heard recently. So thank you for sharing that.

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And thanks for coming by today. Thanks for having me.

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Thanks again to Annyce for stopping by. You can find more about Annyce on LinkedIn and meetup.

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You can find that meetup.com. You can subscribe to the Breaking Changes podcast at postman.com

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slash events slash breaking dash changes.

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I'm your host Kin Lane and until next time, cheers.