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Alan Norbauer
Personal blog · alan.norbauer.com/articles · on HN as altanoprogrammingweb
Alan Norbauer's personal blog at alan.norbauer.com covers programming and web. Since 2016, 11 different Hacker News readers have linked it 19 times, most often “Relay-Style GraphQL”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-08, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Alan Norbauer's articles on GraphQL, mainly a piece on Relay-style GraphQL, in threads on when to use GraphQL and on the N+1 problem.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
The innernet website of Alan Norbauer
Most-linked posts?
- Relay-Style GraphQL3 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2023-07-31
- GitHub Stacks in Jujutsu3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2026-08-13
What Hacker News says?
If you like my garish and ugly theme, it is TST friendly (it will theme the TST tabs as long as you pick the "Photon" TST theme in the TST settings): https://alan.norbauer.com/projects/alanglow
Comment linking /projects/alanglow
on “I've started using Firefox and can never go back to Chrome”Submitted Weird Debugging Tricks the Browser Doesn't Want You to Know as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI wrote another comment the other day ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37125685 ) about how GraphQL has true typing unlike bolted on solutions to REST, and that most people use GraphQL incorrectly then complain about how they're running into problems with N+1 and all that. Basically, the way Facebook originally designed it was in combination with Relay and its graph query optimizing compiler that can stitch yo…
Comment linking /articles/relay-style-graphql
on “Ask HN: When should I use GraphQL”Submitted Weird Debugging Tricks the Browser Doesn't Want You to Know as a story · 3 points
HN discussionOh! I understand the question now. You can put any expression into a conditional breakpoint, so anything you can do in the console you can do in a conditional breakpoint. So, if you're doing this sort of thing once, you can just type it into the console and you're golden. But if you want to modify a stack local variable over and over again every time it is initialized, it's much easier to do in a conditional breakpo…
Comment linking /articles/browser-debugging-tricks
on “Weird Debugging Tricks the Browser Doesn't Want You to Know”Submitted Upgrade Your Development Environments with Devbox as a story · 3 points
HN discussionYour comment made me want to scratch this long-standing itch and write-up why you should disable source maps. Check this out: https://alan.norbauer.com/articles/disable-source-maps
Comment linking /articles/disable-source-maps
on “Weird Debugging Tricks the Browser Doesn't Want You to Know”Submitted GitHub Stacks in Jujutsu as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIt does, but only if you use it as intended, ie with Relay: https://alan.norbauer.com/articles/relay-style-graphql Otherwise, yes, it's not better than REST.
Comment linking /articles/relay-style-graphql
on “Ask HN: If GraphQL Is So Great, Why Doesn't Everyone Use It Already?”Submitted Dying for Beauty as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI wrote another comment the other day ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37125685 ) about how GraphQL has true typing unlike bolted on solutions to REST, and that most people use GraphQL incorrectly then complain about how they're running into problems with N+1 and all that. Basically, the way Facebook originally designed it was in combination with Relay and its graph query optimizing compiler that can stitch yo…
Comment linking /articles/relay-style-graphql
on “Ask HN: If GraphQL Is So Great, Why Doesn't Everyone Use It Already?”Submitted GitHub Stacks in Jujutsu as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI just replied to your other comment but definitely check out the article I mentioned: https://alan.norbauer.com/articles/relay-style-graphql It's not so much downsides of Apollo, more so that it could be done better. Apollo does have things like the n+1 problem which are not present in Relay, so that could be considered a headache as it's annoying to solve if not using Relay.
Comment linking /articles/relay-style-graphql
on “Migrating Netflix to GraphQL Safely”Submitted GitHub Stacks in Jujutsu as a story · 1 points
HN discussionIf you know ThePrimeagen on Twitter/YouTube, he worked on Falcor (the precursor to this GraphQL change) and he talks more about it [0]. GraphQL is very useful, it removes whole classes of bugs. You can even use a Result/Either type where if you don't handle both the success and error cases, the GraphQL request won't even compile, so you can get type safety at both the client and the server while also not having to u…
Comment linking /articles/relay-style-graphql
on “Migrating Netflix to GraphQL Safely”Submitted GitHub Stacks in Jujutsu as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Relay-Style GraphQL as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Relay-Style GraphQL as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Over-engineering a bookmarklet as a story · 1 points
HN discussion