December 2016 Summaries

Hasura was founded by Rajoshi Ghosh and Tanmai Gopal in 2016. The idea for the company originated from their shared frustration with the complexities of building and deploying applications. Initially, they planned to start a food delivery service focusing on home-cooked meals but pivoted when Tanmai developed procrust.es, a database platform that combined the ease of use of a noSQL API with transaction handling capabilities. The positive reception from developers led them to refine and rebrand their technology as Hasura, an open-source GraphQL engine designed to streamline app development by providing a scalable and realtime GraphQL backend.

The text discusses the reasons why Haskell was chosen as the core programming language to build the Hasura platform, and aims to convince readers of its benefits in production. Despite having a steep learning curve, Haskell offers rapid development of robust, concise, and correct software with strong support for integration with other languages, built-in concurrency and parallelism, debuggers, profilers, rich libraries, and an active community. The author shares their experience using Haskell in production projects, highlighting the benefits such as improved code quality, faster development cycles, and easier maintenance. They also address some common challenges faced by beginners, including type errors, documentation issues, and language extensions. Overall, the text emphasizes the satisfaction and enjoyment of programming with Haskell, making it a worthwhile choice for developers.