Software at Scale 49 - State Management with James Cowling

James Cowling is the co-founder of Convex, a state management platform for web developers.

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We discuss the state of web development in the industry today, and the various different approaches to make it easier.

Contrasting the Hasura and Convex approach as a good way to illustrate some of the ideas. Hasura lets you skip the web-app, and run queries against the database through GraphQL queries. Convex, on the other hand, helps you stop worrying about databases. No setup or scaling concerns. It’s interesting to see how various systems are evolving to help developers with reducing the busywork around more and more layers of the stack, and just focus on delivering business value instead.

Convex also excels at the developer experience portion - they provide a deep integration with React, use hooks (just like Apollo GraphQL) and seem to have a fully typed (and therefore auto-completable) SDK. I expect more companies will move “up the stack” to provide deeper integrations with popular tools like React.

Episode Reading List

• The co-founders of this company led Dropbox’s Magic Pocket project.

• Convex → Netlify

• Convex vs. Firebase

• Prisma