May 2021 Summaries

Brave Care is a YC-backed healthcare startup that provides primary, urgent, and remote care for children. The company has recently secured $10 million in funding to expand its operations across multiple states in the US. During the COVID pandemic, Brave Care launched telehealth visits and became the first company to release an online COVID symptom checker. Brave Care uses Hasura as a key component of its tech stack, which includes React Native, TypeScript, Postgres, and serverless functions on AWS Lambda. The adoption of GraphQL and Hasura has significantly improved developer productivity and time-to-market for the company. Hasura provides Brave Care with several benefits, such as role-based access control, flexibility in custom logic implementation, and reduced operational requirements. By using Hasura Cloud, the company can focus on its core business operations without worrying about managing and scaling Hasura.

Pamela Gotti of Credimi discussed at HasuraCon'20 how her company transitioned from REST APIs to GraphQL APIs with Hasura, significantly speeding up their development process. Credimi is a FinTech startup that focuses on invoice financing and medium-long term loans. The use of Hasura has improved the time it takes for them to deploy features in production and enhanced the developer experience by allowing developers to concentrate on delivering business value rather than writing and reading code repeatedly.

Zachary Hughes spoke at HasuraCon'20 about how Prefect's complex multi-tenant architecture and authorization is built with Hasura. He discussed the company's architecture, which includes an inbound request with a JWT in the header that is verified by an auth service before being sent to Hasura. The ORM is used for interacting with Hasura, making it easier for developers to manage permissions and authentication. Prefect uses roles and role-based permissions to delegate permissions in Hasura, reducing the need for custom permissions and authorization.

Hasura has announced the final alpha in their 2.0 series with version 2.0.0-alpha.11. This release includes a docker quickstart and changelog, as well as updates on how they will announce future releases. The new features include changes to computed field arguments, allowing tables with the same name from different sources, an SQL Server Explain API, and more. Hasura invites feedback on any issues experienced and encourages users to try out the latest release via their Docker target or Hasura Cloud deployment option.

Athlane, an esports marketing and analytics platform, increased their developer velocity by 200% using Hasura Cloud. After migrating from Firebase to Postgres, they needed a solution for building their data access layer without consuming significant development resources. They chose Hasura Cloud due to its comprehensive GraphQL capabilities, ease of use, security features, and managed service offering. Utilizing Hasura's GraphQL engine allowed every engineer on the team to operate as a full-stack developer, significantly increasing efficiency. The platform also provided real-time messaging functionality through GraphQL subscriptions and supported serverless architecture with auto-scaling and automatic upgrades.

In this tutorial, we learn how to create a GraphQL API for Notion using Hasura Actions. First, we set up things on Notion's side by creating a workspace and an integration with the relevant name and workspace. We then share a page or database in Notion that can be accessed using the API. Next, we deploy Hasura to get a GraphQL API and create an Action for adding a new item to the database. The Notion API is used to add items to the database, and the Action code is written and deployed on Glitch. Finally, we test the GraphQL API in Hasura Console API Explorer and define permissions for the Action. This process can be repeated for any of Notion's REST APIs by defining custom types appropriately and writing the webhook handler.

Graphqurl v1.0 is a CLI tool for making GraphQL queries with features such as autocomplete, customizable local GraphiQL environment, and support for subscriptions over websocket. It can be used as a library with Node.js or from the browser. In v1.0, the bundle size has been significantly reduced by using light-weight isomorphic HTTP clients instead of Apollo client. The scripting API has also been improved, but syntax errors in GraphQL queries will not be caught before execution. Upcoming features include TypeScript support and allowing refreshing websocket connections if auth session expires.

Pulley, an alumnus of YCombinator 2020, used Hasura's GraphQL engine to cut development time by 50% and build their product in just three months. The company leveraged Hasura features such as auto-generated GraphQL schemas and resolvers for over 50 database tables, data migrations, security and permissions model, and fast performance. Pulley's technical architecture was composed of a Postgres database, backend written in Go, and web front end using React. They chose Hasura to manage their cap table and employee equity, helping startups manage stock options and perform pro forma modeling to optimize their equity.

In May 2021, Hasura Cloud introduced new regions in the US West (Oregon), US East (N. Virginia), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) to provide a faster experience for users worldwide. Additionally, an updated monitoring dashboard was released, offering a single view of important metrics and quick access to multi-db performance measurements. Users can find more information on Twitter (@HasuraHQ) or the Hasura Community Discord, while those new to Hasura Cloud can start with the Getting Started documentation.

This tutorial demonstrates how to use Cloudflare Workers and Hasura GraphQL Engine to build applications with JWT authentication and role-based content access. It covers setting up an initial Cloudflare Worker scaffold, creating a new Hasura project, implementing JWT authentication using Cloudflare Workers and Hasura Actions, writing a frontend for user registration and login, and testing the setup. The tutorial aims to provide a better understanding of Cloudflare workers and fundamental knowledge of Hasura to build applications effectively.

In November last year, TypeScript introduced template literal types which opened up new possibilities for developers. These types allowed for more precise control over string literals and made it easier to maintain code. At Hasura, we recently utilized these template literal types in our multiple database support feature. By using Path and PathValue types along with a get function, we were able to implement type-safe dot string notation and autocomplete features. This greatly improved the developer experience and allowed for safer code writing.

This article discusses common errors encountered in GraphQL and how to fix them. Unlike traditional HTTP error handling, GraphQL has its own structure for errors which can be categorized into server problems/network errors, client-side validation issues, top-level errors, and field-level errors. Additionally, specific errors may arise when using GraphQL subscriptions with websocket connections. Understanding these error types can help developers quickly identify and fix issues in their GraphQL applications.

In this talk at HasuraCon'20, Avinash Moondra discussed shifting from Rails to Hasura and the differences and similarities between the two. He highlighted four major shifts in moving from a monolithic MVC architecture to an event-driven service-oriented architecture: 1) Monolithic MVC vs Event-Driven SOA, 2) REST vs GraphQL, 3) ORM vs ?, and 4) Pillars. He emphasized that understanding these shifts can help developers transition smoothly from Rails to Hasura while minimizing surprises and increasing confidence in the new technology.

Uri Goldshtein discussed how Hasura's remote joins feature and GraphQL Mesh can be used to create data graphs. He explained that the combination of these tools allows for fast-paced application development in enterprise environments, as well as integration with other sources such as third-party APIs. GraphQL Mesh is a tool that takes any source and converts it into an executable GraphQL schema, which can then be run as a gateway or SDK on existing services. This enables the creation of a cohesive platform for data management and integration.

Pipe, a fintech startup, transformed its growth by unlocking companies' revenue through its platform. In just one year, the company gained over 3,500 customers and $1 billion in tradable annual recurring revenue with only 11 engineers. The key to their success was incorporating Hasura into their technical architecture, which provided tangible benefits such as a 90% reduction in time for new feature development, simplified data fetching, and enhanced security. Pipe's decision to use Hasura helped them save $600k annually by needing 50% fewer developers than anticipated.

Ali Spittel discussed how Hasura makes learning to code easier during her talk at HasuraCon'20. As a lead instructor at General Assembly, she has experience teaching coding and finds that Hasura simplifies the process for new developers by providing an accessible platform for creating endpoints. She also highlighted how Hasura enables full-stack development, allowing everyone to build applications without needing extensive knowledge of various technologies. Spittel shared her experiences using Hasura in her own teaching methods, emphasizing the importance of breaking down complex topics into manageable parts and celebrating students' wins. Additionally, she discussed gamifying learning by building games with Hasura and implementing the Gradual Release of Responsibility to encourage self-directed learning.