What better place to hold the inaugural Hasura London meetup than L39 at One Canada Square. Yes, this is an actual photo taken from the evening. Many thanks to Ben Ford and Jesse Martin for organising! Somehow I didn’t actually find out about the event until a week before but luckily I was able to attend.
It transpired that before the Hasura meetup there was a workshop, so I decided to attend this too. The story here was that we had 3 hours and the plan was to work through a real business problem and build a solution there and then. As always with these things the business requirements led to an increasingly complex data model, and there was some consternation that we’d spent too long on the data model, but once we’d got it right, we built out the remaining solution in no time.
Hang on? How did we do that exactly? You did what in 3 hours at Hasura?
- Created the schema
- Launched the database and created the tables
- Launched Hasura and hooked it up
- Built a pipeline in n8n to populate the database from an open API that we’d not seen before
- Built a UI to display various analytics using Retool. (With a single click this also became editable too)
Yup! and that is mighty impressive. Obviously there’s a whole 80/20 rule thing going on here, and the devil would be in the detail, but it shows what this simple #LowCode stack can achieve.
And finally an interesting snippet from the workshop, one company went from nothing, to a #Unicorn (1bn valuation, doesn’t seem to matter these days whether thats $, £ or Eur!) in a year. And what was their core tech? Yes, Hasura.
Anyway, workshop over, it was time for some snacks and to get ready for the usergroup. The main talk was from Tom and was all about whether or not various things are turing complete. That led on to something called the game of life, which itself IS turing complete. So; seemingly the obvious conclusion was that if you can implement the game of life in Hasura then hasura must be turing complete! Excellent. Well after hitting rate limit after rate limit with various free services, it was shown to work.
Secondly, Jesse did an ad-hoc demo showing off some work he’d been doing on a pizza ordering system which again, we got working fine. This shows off the new feature around streaming, which is subtly different to subscriptions – in streaming only the changes are sent as messages, rather than the whole object – something that is particularly interesting in the gaming arena, and also funnily enough, it’s how the F1 data API works too.
I must say thanks to everyone involved, to the organisers, and to everyone who came, and hopefully there’ll be another one later in the year.
