Software at Scale 38 - Hasura with Tanmai Gopal

Software at Scale

Tanmai Gopal is the founder of Hasura, an API as a service platform. Hasura lets you skip writing API layers and exposes automatic GraphQL APIs that talk to your database, trigger external actions, and much more.

We talk about the implementation of a “compiler as a service”, the implications of primarily having a Haskell production codebase, their experience with GraphQL, hiring product managers technical enough to build useful features, some new and upcoming Hasura features, and riff about the current state of front-end development and `npm` hell.

Highlights

00:20 - What does the name Hasura mean?

02:00 - What does Hasura do?

04:00 - Why build this layer of the stack?

08:00 - How to deal with authentication if APIs are exposed directly via the database.

26:00 - Does Hasura make production applications faster?

33:00 - JSON Aggregation in modern databases

38:00 - Why Haskell?

44:00 - How do you write quality Haskell? How does hiring for Haskell positions work out in practice?

55:00 - Application servers do much more than just talk to databases. How does Hasura provide escape hatches so that non-database interactions (for eg: talking to Stripe) work out?

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