Left to its own devices, software companies ship its own team structure (Conway’s Law). Scale leads to data silos, unclear ownership, and an incoherent GraphQL schema. Zillow pushes back against this natural entropy. Organizing data post hoc is untenable — trying to keep up with the legions of changing SaaS systems is a losing battle. The schema must be organized at the data producer end. This is the story of Zillow’s journey to bring order to a chaotic GraphQL schema. Starting with its most critical data domains, listings and customers, Zillow has built a canonical data schema in its federated graph, that aligns its multiple business units and streamlines data sharing.
Zillow Group, Senior Principal Engineer
Senior Principal SDE at Zillow Group by day, avid user by night. Sam Deng is catalyst for foundational platforms that power the Zillow Super App. He is a purveyor of dad jokes, software architect, former runner, and occasional AI-empowered code slinger.
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