What GraphQL Is, Simply

What if your API layer could help you ship faster today and make tomorrow’s AI workflows safer and easier to build?

Apollo CEO Matt DeBergalis explains how GraphQL became a practical standard for unifying messy backends, why declarative schemas and strong types are the “bedrock” for agentic systems, and where MCP fits when you want agents to call business data safely. You’ll hear real examples of speeding up frontends, tightening observability, and running focused personalization without “fat” APIs.

What you’ll learn:
A plain-language model for GraphQL and why it decouples frontend needs from backend services
How typing, schema docs, and field-level telemetry reduce risk and enable LLM-driven tooling
Practical ways to expose queries as MCP tools and start with internal “agentic DevOps”
Tactics for experiments and personalization that stay fast and measurable at scale
Why an end-to-end approach (client and server) matters for reliability and speed

#platformengineering #api #graphql #apidesign

Guest: Matt DeBergalis, CEO and Co-Founder of Apollo GraphQL
Matt DeBergalis is the Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Apollo GraphQL, focused on bringing the popular GraphQL technology to the enterprise. He previously served as Apollo's CTO, leading product and engineering. Matt's longtime focus has been in open source and platforms: he co-founded Meteor.js, which grew to become one of the most popular open-source projects in the world for developing full-stack web apps with JavaScript, as well as ActBlue, the American political fundraising platform that revolutionized grassroots political giving. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and resides in the San Francisco Bay Area with his family. In his spare time, Matt enjoys taking to the air and flying his 1966 Beechcraft Baron.
Matt DeBergalis, LinkedIn 👉   / debergalis  
Apollo GraphQL, website 👉 https://www.apollographql.com/
Apollo GraphQL, GitHub 👉 https://github.com/apollographql
Apollo GraphQL, LinkedIn 👉   / apollo-graphql  
Apollo GraphQL, X 👉 https://x.com/apollographql
Apollo GraphQL, YouTube 👉    / apollographql  

Links to interesting things from this episode:
Free Software Foundation 👉 https://www.fsf.org/
Cursor 👉 https://cursor.com/
Motley Fool podcast 👉 https://www.fool.com/podcasts/
GraphQL Summit 👉 https://summit.graphql.com/

Chapters
0:00 Welcome and why Matt’s work matters
1:21 From Commodore to Apollo: Matt’s path and role shift
2:56 CEO who still codes and how AI keeps leaders hands‑on
5:04 GraphQL in plain language and the SQL analogy
6:27 Decoupling frontend needs from backend services
8:23 Declarative platforms, Kubernetes parallels, and observability
11:37 Tracking deprecated fields and reducing API risk
12:56 Enterprise realities: unifying legacy systems for speed
14:49 Types, reliability, and the road to agentic development
16:51 A quick win: store currency as integer cents, not float
18:39 App‑developer–first APIs and schemas that guide agents
23:55 Turning queries into MCP tools and narrowing context
27:07 Intelligent apps and personalization without “fat” APIs
32:04 Retail lessons: performance, experiments, and relevance
37:33 Beyond the text box: reactive UI inside chat
39:54 End‑to‑end stack thinking: client to server with Apollo
41:55 Parting takeaways and where to learn more