Thread by @jbell

This seems like a fine time to look back on the rather decent API platform our team built at Twitter.

THE YEAR IS 2017. Building new features for the bird app means exposing new data over Twitter’s APIs. This involves coordinating changes across many services and many teams, because microservices.

Flash forward to 2022. Over 5 years, we’ve migrated almost every api used by the Twitter app into a unified graphql interface. Getting api changes into production used to be measured in weeks, now it's measured in hours.

For the last 2 years, EVERY SINGLE new Twitter feature was delivered on this api platform. Twitter blue, spaces, tweet edit, birdwatch, and many many many others.

This api platform serves your home timeline, every tweet embedded in your favorite nytimes article, and the entirety of the 3rd-party developer api which uses our graphql system to fulfill every part of every api request.

Just in this calendar year, there have been over 1000 changes to this graphql api by over 300 developers at Twitter. The api serves 1.5 BILLION graphql fields per second across 3000 different data types. The system is vast, developerable, and efficient.

Getting to this point didn’t happen overnight. It was slow! It was hard! It wasn’t always clear that it would work. What if it took too long!?

We got here with deep & long-term commitment of engineering leadership. Managers grew a team around an early prototype, directors prioritized api migrations, and partner teams front-loaded integrations with the platform without knowing if/when their work would pay off.

This platform has been a critical but invisible part of powering nimble product development at twitter, reaching literally millions of users every hour of every day.

The pace of product changes that are (and will be) coming to Twitter would literally not be possible without the long-term investments we’ve made in building this api platform.

I’m exceptionally proud of what our team has built over the last 5 years. It is hardcore engineering at scale, solving difficult problems, built humanely.

The team that built this platform are the kindest and most talented humans that I’ve had the privilege of working with.

Thank you.

#OneTeam