A weekly newsletter of the best news, articles and projects about GraphQL

Listen in to Byteconf GraphQL 2020, an online conference with several influential speakers such as Eve Porcello, William Lyon, Nader Dabit, and more. There are tutorials on GraphQL servers with Express, thoughts on leveraging the power of a typed schema, and talks about the misconception of GraphQL.

In this talk, Kylie Stewart explores APIs and the evolution of best practices. She unpacks how those evolving practices brought us to GraphQL and how this query language might benefit your codebase, with examples along the way.

Follow along with Ben Award as he discovers a performance problem related to GraphQL and how he manages to debug and fix it. He examines beta type-graphql performance and looks for optimization by lowering the number of results fetched.

This presentation by Michael Watson, a customer success engineer from Apollo, shares the best practices for your GraphQL schema and client operations. He starts with some common do’s and don’ts for your schema that will help clients more easily consume your graph. Then, he covers some common pitfalls seen in GraphQL operations and the changes that can be made to bring some clarity into your graph.

Watch Ben Awad’s live coding session where he explores the N+1 problem when building a GraphQL server. He shares some solutions that utilize DataLoader and database joins to combat against this common issue. Follow along as he breaks apart each technique and takes a look at join-monster, a library that takes the GraphQL query and does conditional joining.

This talk by Sean Grove at ReasonConf US 2019 discusses the benefits to using OneGraph, a GraphQL service that wraps and connects the internet’s SaaS APIs. Sean steps through how processing a request to OneGraph looks like and also provides a demo on OneGraphiQL, which helps visually build and explore GraphQL queries.

Learn from Ruben Oostinga as he presents at the GraphQL London #11 on federation, managed GraphQL services, and persistent queries. He explains why GraphQL will solve many technical and organizational challenges s you can focus on building business value. Ruben also shares useful tools like graphql-transform-federation, swagger, and more to help quickly support your micro service architecture.

Listen to this talk at the GraphQL Berlin Meetup as Flavian Desverne shares the challenges of building type-safe GraphQL servers with a database. He demos building a backend while focusing on end to end type safety, zero-config, conventions over configurations, no boilerplate, and more.

In Charles Lee’s talk, he presents on how Shopify has been updating and deprecating one of their most used GraphQL APIs, with the help of permissions, visibility markers, and versioning. He explores the setup of their GraphQL API and explains why Shopify has versioned schemas, which helps local development provide checks to ensure version constraints.

In a video tutorial, Ben Awad does a walkthrough and gives an explanation for a GraphQL Typescript boilerplate that he created. The boilerplate includes authentication via sessions and the github repo itself offers instructions on how to later deploy the app to Heroku or DigitalOcean.

In her talk from the 8th GraphQL SF Meetup, Christina Yu shares her lessons learned relating to GraphQL errors in her team at Paypal. At first she covers how they handled the errors and subsequently discusses how they tracked and optimised them. To track them she used a Grafana dashboard and a product called Apollo Graph Manager, as well as other Apollo tools.

In this presentation, James Lawrie from The New York Times shares the number of queries served, data received and served, and the large amount of types and fields in their schema in order to demonstrate how GraphQL has helped the company scale to their current size. Listen in on how they handled geo-targeting, schema directives, active cache invalidation, and more.

This talk discusses different state management that works well with GraphQL as well as how to use hooks to manage state. Shruti Kapoor explores the use of Redux along with GraphQL and the challenges, like immutability and the huge boilerplate. She demos using hooks with a React app that takes advantage of GraphQL to reduce the amount of data to state manage.

Guillaume Scheibel presents at Devoxx Belgium 2019 on how the engineering team at Expedia implemented GraphQL and improved its APIs functionality. The speaker breaks down the reasons why Expedia switched to GraphQL, the team’s challenges with REST, and the inconsistencies amongst types. He shares the architecture behind a cohesive API experience and live codes how to generate schemas from Kotlin types with the open source project GraphQL-Kotlin.

Nik Graf speaks at the React Advanced 2019 Conference on some tips for better designing GraphQL schemas. He shares his thoughts on explicit naming, aliases, nullable fields, and connections, as he provides sample code snippets of good and bad examples. For anyone defining GraphQL schemas, learn how to maintain your schemas over time from the lessons Nik suggests.

Tim Suchanek at ViennaJS walks through a step by step tutorial on building a full-stack application using Apollo Client, GraphQL Nexus, Photon.js, and GraphQL Code Generator. He live codes to demonstrate adding a field to GraphQL queries on the frontend and to the schema. He also discusses the importance of type safety and how developers can practice end-to-end type safety to be more efficient with their code.

This talk by James Neate from the 2019 Platform Summit focuses on the implications of interacting with GraphQL and REST APIs while comparing the two from a consumer perspective. He live demos in real time the differences between approaching both APIs when building user interfaces. Watch as James compares REST and GraphQL responsiveness, usability, documentation, and more.

Check out this talk at the React Advanced 2019 by Bernardo Raposo where he provides his presentation slides as well as all the resources to get started with figma-graphql. He presents how to utilize the Figma API and convert GraphQL queries into styles for your components. The talk includes other frontend tools you can use to provide easier access to design files, have responsive image components, and more.

Nader Dabit’s presentation at the ReactiveConf 2019 discusses how developers are using GraphQL as an API gateway to handle unexpected use cases. He first introduces modern AWS technologies where he goes over useful tools such as AWS AppSync and Amplify Framework. Some cases include passing the query to Lambda or Serverless functions for processing or even writing geospatial and time-based queries.

Ben Awad offers an overview of some popular GraphQL tools that he recommends using depending on schema-first or code-first development. Watch and learn as he shares his experience with multiple server set ups, databases, ORM tools, and other GraphQL services. Ben also provides his thoughts on React frontend tools that work the best in junction with GraphQL.

Mirko Nasato dives deep into the concepts of integrating Express with an Apollo Server, passing arguments in GraphQL queries, handling associations between objects, and more. This section is an excerpt from the full course on learning GraphQL with fullstack JavaScript examples. He live codes how to build specific queries as well as view your data through GraphiQL.

Check out this talk from the JAMstack Conference 2019 by Sean Grove where he explains the lifecycle for a developer using GraphQL. Sean walks through the steps of creating a JAMstack app and explores how to automate an ad-hoc GraphQL pipeline from start to finish. He demos how to combine multiple persisted queries in GraphQL to succinctly encompass all of the chaining work.

This collection of videos is a great resource for watching the talks from the GraphQL Berlin meetup. It includes presentations on system design and architecture, key learnings from implementing auth with GraphQL, and singularity. Learn more about GraphQL fundamentals as well as implementation patterns from these discussions.

A great introductory GraphQL tutorial by the Fireship Youtube channel. While building a killer SpaceX themed web application and GraphQL API you will learn all the basics including querying, types, resolvers and even some type generation. All this while building an Angular web application.

An extreme deep dive into malicious attacks on GraphQL and security strategies to mitigate these risks. The excellent talk includes detailed examples and explanations of the more common ways to abuse a GraphQL API through querying, SQL injection, and even some pre-built tools. A great watch for advanced GraphQL use cases.

Dinah at Github Packages does a great job of reviewing how Github handles a GraphQL monolith at scale. With great examples of filed level authorization, server efficiency, rate limiting and cacheing, this talk is power packed with GraphQL strategies and best practices. Examples are in Ruby but the conventions are relevant to most GraphQL implementations.

In this webinar, John Wilkins shares the benefits of a universal GraphQL graph over traditional web services like REST and JSON:API. He also provides points on how a GraphQL endpoint provides data and how GraphQL can stitch multiple sources of data into one graph using schema stitching. John live demos simple schema stitching using Gatsby’s gatsby-source-graphql plugin.

Listen to Alexys Jacob’s talk from the EuroPython Conference 2019 where he shares the workflow and tools Numberly used to build, deploy, and operate GraphQL APIs on their Kubernetes cluster. He provides code and command examples to explain the transition from REST APIs on Web servers to GraphQL APIs containers on Kubernetes. The talk also includes how the Kubernetes cluster was designed, their GraphQL stack, and what Numberly is working on to continuously improve.

Check out Roy Derks’ talk at the Node.js Edinburgh Meetup 2019 where he presents the problems of multiple endpoints, over-fetching, versioning, and more that come with REST and how flexible GraphQL is in solving these issues. He also shares some sample code on adding authentication to properly validate JWTs with your GraphQL wrapper. Roy demos how to implement GraphQL on top of your existing data and code in a secure manner.

Patrick Arminio presents GraphQL in Python at the EuroPython Conference, where he describes what GraphQL is and what the current state of GraphQL libraries is in Python. He provides a brief history and several examples as to why GraphQL has advantages over REST. The talk also takes a look at the new library, Strawberry, that is inspired by dataclasses and can help generate GraphQL schemas and enable static type-checking.

Learn how Serverless applications work with Marcia Villalba in this brief talk discussing the different methods of implementing your own GraphQL server and how the AppSync platform functions. She explains the advantages to using AWS AppSync and what features are available on the console. Marcia also dives into the importance of infrastructure as code and integrating the Serverless Framework plugin.

Follow along with Ben Awad as he live codes how to add JWT authentication to your project with this fullstack tutorial using Node.js, Typescript, GraphQL, React, and PostgreSQL. Ben steps through setting up a GraphQL server on the backend and GraphQL Code Generator on the frontend. The app can handle authenticated mutations/queries, register users, refresh tokens, and more.

Rizchel Dayao shares her insight on building an application with large volumes of data and configurations from start to finish using React, Redux, and GraphQL. She explains her experience of using React Containers, GraphQL middleware, and server side routing to build an enterprise application for IBM Cloud. The talk also includes a breakdown of why the engineering team chose this stack and some examples of best practices for optimal performance.

Listen to this informative talk by Luke Herrington that discusses when to use decoupled architecture and how to add design consistency, query optimization, simpler frontends, and more to your API. Luke examines how GraphQL types and queries are shared in the component library as data and how to design a content API. His presentation includes several examples on writing a cross platform UI library that implements a design schema and how it can be used as the rendering engine for each platform.

Watch Phil Pluckthun and Jovi De Croock from Formidable Labs in this live-coding session as they teach how to set up a GraphQL-powered frontend using URQL, a customizable GraphQL client. The two use Gatsby to demonstrate how to implement URQL and create a basic voting system.