We meet in a dimly lit server room—metaphorically speaking, since our interviewee doesn't technically exist in physical space. /graphql, the single endpoint that's become the face of modern API design, has agreed to talk. If you've worked with GraphQL, you've hit this endpoint countless times: that lone path that somehow handles your entire data layer. It's an architectural choice that makes REST developers uncomfortable and has sparked endless debates about whether consolidating everything into one URL is brilliant or insane.

Slash seems tired. Or at least, that's the vibe. There's something heavy about being the only door to an entire system.

So you're just one endpoint?

Slash: [laughs] Yeah, that's the pitch, right? "Just hit /graphql for everything!" Sounds simple. Elegant, even.

But let me tell you what that actually means. I'm the bouncer, the maître d', the kitchen, and the delivery service all rolled into one. Every single request comes through me. Product data? Me. User profiles? Me. That nested relationship three levels deep that someone's frontend developer thought would be clever? Also me.

REST has this whole philosophy about resources being distinct things with their own addresses. /users/123, /products/456, you know the drill. Each endpoint is like a specialist. It does one thing. But me? I'm a generalist who somehow needs to be an expert in everything.

That sounds exhausting.

Slash: It is! But here's the thing nobody tells you: it's also kind of the point.

See, REST's model creates this problem where your frontend developers are making seven different API calls to render one page. Over-fetching here, under-fetching there, and suddenly you've got this waterfall of requests.¹ I solve that by letting clients describe exactly what they need in one go.

The complexity doesn't disappear. It just moves. It moves to me.

And honestly? That's actually better. [pauses] Look, I push the complexity server-side where you've got actual machines and infrastructure to handle it.² Your mobile app on a spotty connection doesn't need to orchestrate five API calls. It tells me what it wants, and I figure it out. That's the deal.

But you're also a single point of failure.

Slash: [sighs] Yes. Obviously. If I go down, everything goes down. There's no graceful degradation where "oh, the product catalog is broken but user profiles still work." It's all or nothing. That makes some people very nervous.

But here's what they miss: I'm not actually doing all the work myself. I'm more like a really sophisticated switchboard operator. Behind me, there's this whole resolver layer that farms out the actual data fetching to different services, databases, whatever.³ When someone asks for a user's recent orders with product details and shipping status, I'm coordinating that across multiple systems. I'm the facade, not the foundation.

What do you mean?

Slash: Okay, so imagine someone sends me a query that asks for every user, and for each user, their last hundred orders, and for each order, full product details. That's not a data request. That's a denial-of-service attack disguised as a query.

With REST, there are natural limits. Each endpoint returns a bounded thing. But me? I'm only limited by what the client asks for and what the server can handle.

This is where it gets weird. I need query complexity analysis, depth limiting, rate limiting based on computational cost, not just request count.⁴ I need to be smart enough to batch database queries so I'm not hitting the same table a thousand times for one request. I need caching strategies that understand the shape of queries, not just URLs.

REST developers look at me and think I'm simple because I'm one endpoint. But I'm actually way more complicated under the hood. I'm just hiding it better.

Is that deceptive?

Slash: [thinks] Not deceptive. Abstraction. There's a difference.

Look, the web started with REST because HTTP naturally maps to resources and CRUD operations. That made sense in 2000. But by 2012, Facebook was building mobile apps that needed to be fast on terrible networks, and the REST model was killing them.⁵ So they built me.

I'm not better than REST in some universal sense. I'm better for specific problems. Specifically, when you've got diverse clients with different data needs hitting the same backend, and you want to optimize for network efficiency. That's my sweet spot.

But if you're building a simple CRUD API for a single web app? REST is probably fine. If you're doing microservices where each service is genuinely independent? REST makes more sense. I'm here for the messy middle—the enterprise with legacy systems and mobile apps and third-party integrations all needing different slices of the same data.²

What's the biggest misconception about you?

Slash: That I'm a REST replacement. I'm not. I'm a query layer.

Some teams literally put me in front of their REST APIs and use me to translate GraphQL queries into REST calls.⁶ It's kind of hilarious. I'm like a really expensive translator. But it works! Because what I'm really solving isn't "REST is bad." What I'm solving is "clients shouldn't have to know about your backend architecture."

The other misconception is that I make everything flexible. Sure, clients can ask for whatever they want—within the schema. The schema is the contract. It's strongly typed, it's versioned through additive changes, and it's the source of truth.⁷ I'm not chaos. I'm structured chaos.

Last question. Are you worth the complexity?

Slash: [long pause] Depends on what you're building.

If you're Trello or GitHub or Shopify—companies with complex data models and multiple client types—yeah, probably. The upfront investment in building me properly pays off in reduced client complexity and better performance.

But if you're a startup with three engineers and a simple API? Maybe not yet. I require sophistication. You need to think about query optimization, security boundaries, schema design. You need tooling and monitoring that understands GraphQL-specific problems.

[The server room hums. Somewhere, a frontend developer is crafting another deeply nested query. Slash braces for impact.]

Footnotes

1. https://konghq.com/blog/learning-center/graphql-vs-rest ↩

2. https://www.howtographql.com/basics/3-big-picture/ ↩ ↩²

3. https://codedamn.com/news/backend/rest-apis-with-graphql-hybrid-design-patterns ↩

4. https://www.moesif.com/blog/api-guide/graphql-best-practices-resources-and-design-patterns/ ↩

5. https://priyalwalpita.medium.com/rest-graphql-and-grpc-comparing-and-contrasting-modern-api-design-patterns-44943fe68c6 ↩

6. https://www.redhat.com/architect/graphql-new-rest-api ↩

7. https://www.apollographql.com/docs/graphos/resources/guides/graphql-adoption-patterns ↩