James Cowling at Developer Week 2024

At Developer Week 2024, James Cowling, co-founder of Convex and an expert in large-scale distributed systems, delivered a compelling talk on the urgent need for backend platforms to be designed with frontend developers in mind.

Drawing from his extensive experience, including pivotal work at Dropbox, Cowling argued that the current state of backend development is mired in complexity that hinders productivity and innovation.

By advocating for a return to foundational principles of abstraction and encapsulation, Cowling's insights offer a roadmap for creating more efficient, developer-friendly platforms.


Abstraction as a Necessity: Embrace abstraction to significantly reduce the cognitive load on developers, enabling them to focus on innovation rather than the intricacies of backend systems.

Revise Query Models: Query models should be intuitive and flexible, moving away from exposing databases directly to clients or relying heavily on declarative languages like SQL.

Embrace Type Safety: Implementing end-to-end type safety can prevent numerous bugs and vulnerabilities, making apps more secure and easier to maintain.

Automated Schema Inference: Platforms like Convex infer schema automatically, allowing developers to move quickly without compromising on the robustness of their applications.

Simplify Caching with Dynamic Consistent Caching: By automating caching, platforms can offer consistent, up-to-date data, reducing the need for developers to manage cache invalidation manually.

Guarantee End-to-End Consistency: The platform should extend the consistency boundary all the way to the client, ensuring that users always see the most current data.

Unified Development Experience: By treating the backend as a coherent, integrated library, developers can write, deploy, and scale applications more efficiently and intuitively.


By adopting principles that prioritize developer experience and productivity, we can overcome the "platform crisis" and unlock new levels of creativity and efficiency in software development. Cowling’s Convex platform exemplifies this approach, demonstrating that with the right tools and mindset, building dynamic, scalable applications can be straightforward and accessible to all developers.


How do you think these principles could impact your work?