Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders

S4 E17: Matt DeBergalis, Apollo GraphQL

Apr 27, 2021

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Matt DeBergalis has been into tech since he was a boy, playing games like Flight Simulator on his Commodore 64 and reviewing the schematics in the handbook. To Matt, computers are tools to make things possible... and enable people to do it quickly. He loves community building, with his background in politics, and he loves the open source world. He finds that it's a powerful force for organizing people to create what wasn't possible before.

He lives in San Francisco, with his wife and 6 year old. And he's a private pilot, owning his own plane. When asked how he balances all he has going on, he quickly replies that anything worth doing is going to require hard work. For him, this is his family, flights and code adventures.

Previously, Matt co-wrote an open source product called Meteor, attempting to make it simpler and faster to write JS applications. At the core of the tool, there was a capability to write a query to move data around, instead of writing the code. They took that capability, and formed what they are focused on today.

This is the creation story of Apollo GraphQL.