What to ask your agency about REST and GraphQL

Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on REST and GraphQL, these questions are worth asking early.

Code gets read far more often than it gets written, and usually by someone with less context than the author had. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

REST is simpler to cache and easier to reason about. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

The right answer depends on your clients, not on fashion. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

The short version

Most development decisions are really maintenance decisions wearing a different hat. Three things worth confirming about REST and GraphQL before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• GraphQL shines when clients need wildly different shapes of data — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.