April 15, 2021

GraphQL Summit Worldwide 2021 [Recap]

Khalil Stemmler

Khalil Stemmler

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.

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.

Watch here.

Testing React Apollo Client

Adhithi Ravichandran (@AdhithiRavi) shows us how to test React components, queries, mutations, error states and loading states.

Watch here.

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.

Watch here.

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.

Watch here.

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.

Watch here.

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.

Watch here.

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.

Watch here.

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.

Watch here.

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.

Watch here.

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!

Written by

Khalil Stemmler

Khalil Stemmler

Read more by Khalil Stemmler