Well folks, that’s another GraphQL Summit Worldwide in the books 👋. We heard some talks on client-side GraphQL, federation, subscriptions, and testing.
In this post, I’d like to sum up the biggest takeaways from day one of the conference. If you missed any of the talks, fret not my friend — you can watch them on-demand.
Apollo’s new GraphQL tools for better collaboration, testing, and security
Since the last summit, we’ve released a number of new tools to help you build better with GraphQL. Here’s a highlight of some of the latest and greatest from Apollo.
- Getting started: Build out your first dev graph using Apollo Studio’s GraphQL IDE (Explorer) and save time with powerful features (like intelligent search and variable extraction), running locally on your machine.
- Register, test, deploy: Use Rover (Apollo’s new CLI tool) to register your graph to Apollo’s Schema Registry.
- Collaborate & manage: With your graph variants (testing, staging, production) published to the registry, you have access to all of Apollo Studio’s collaboration, productivity, and reporting tools like Apollo Explorer, client awareness, metrics reporting, performance alerts, schema change notifications, and more! Log in and see what’s going on with your graph.
- Design your federated graph: Ready to grow? Apollo Workbench, a new schema design tool built by the Solutions team at Apollo, helps you migrate from monolith or schema-stitching to Federation.
You can watch the Apollo keynote here.
Client-side GraphQL
Oh Hello Apollo Client, Farewell Redux
In this talk, Ankita Kulkarni (@kulkarniankita9) discusses the needs of a good state management approach and takes us through how to migrate from Redux to Apollo Client 3.
Testing React Apollo Client
Adhithi Ravichandran (@AdhithiRavi) shows us how to test React components, queries, mutations, error states and loading states.
GraphQL and Mobile Panel
Check out this panel featuring engineers from Apollo (Ellen Shapiro — @designatednerd, Martin Bonnin — @martinbonnin), GitHub (Hesham Salman — @_IronHam), and Shopify (Ivan Savytskyi — @sav007) as they discuss major themes in mobile app development like dealing with types, caching, nullability, and error handling.
Architecture
Using Subscriptions with Your Federated Data Graph
Instead of building subscriptions directly into your graph, Mandi Wise (@mandiwise) demonstrates a decoupled approach to provide subscription support in the context of a federated architecture, but in a scalable, maintainable, and performant way.
Server Driven UIs on the Web with GraphQL
Faraz Ahmad (@farazamiruddin) teaches us an architectural pattern useful for teams that want to deliver a consistent experience across a number of devices. In the server-driven UI architecture, the server is responsible for the layout and props of the components, leaving the clients to merely fulfill the contract.
The Power of Schema: How to work in the Future
Kyle Schrade (@NotKyleSchrade) walks us through an approach to using nullability and feature flags to keep your schema maintainable over time.
Federation, Maintenance & Culture
How Your Infrastructure Choices Make (or Break) Your Team Culture
In this talk by Jason Lengstorf (@jlengstorf), we learn how about what makes systems complex and hard for developers to ship code then present a remedy: a checklist of cultural and architectural changes you can make to keep your teams productive.
Acquiring a Data Graph
Taz Singh (@tazsingh) explains how GraphQL and Apollo Federation helped his team unify their data while going through mergers and acquisitions.
GraphQL Observability
Once we deploy our GraphQL server to production, how do we ensure that everything is working as intended? In this talk, Ash Narcisse (@_darkfadr) teaches us how to keep tabs on your production graph with observability though OpenTelemetry and Apollo Studio.
Conclusion
A major thank you to all of the speakers for sharing your experiences with the community.
Reminder, if you missed any of the talks, you can watch them here on-demand.
See you next year!
