GraphQL Summit 2016 in Tweets
Sashko Stubailo
On October 26, 2016, the Apollo team hosted the first-ever GraphQL conference. Over 350 GraphQL enthusiasts from around the world converged in San Francisco and took part in a full day of talks and discussions about the up-and-coming technology. We’re working on posting videos of the talks, but while you wait, read the story of GraphQL Summit as told by the attendees!
Starting off the day
The first batch of talks
The Meteor Development Group / Apollo CEO Geoff Schmidt started off the day with a keynote reminding us how far GraphQL has come, and announcing a new commercial product for instrumenting GraphQL servers, Apollo Optics.
Marc-André Giroux and Dylan Thacker-Smith from Shopify talked about how Shopify uses GraphQL.
Jeff Cross from Google and Uri Goldshtein from the Apollo team talked about Angular 2 and how to use it with a GraphQL-first development process:
Next, Joe Savona from the Facebook’s GraphQL team talked about what they’ve learned through 4 years of building GraphQL clients internally:
Second batch: After lunch
After hanging out at lunch, we got to hear Brandon Black talk about why GitHub chose GraphQL for its new platform, and the tools they have been building around it:
Next, Danielle Man and Sashko Stubailo (me!) took the stage to talk about GraphQL-first development, and the tools the Apollo team is building to make it possible, including graphql-tools and Apollo Client:
Afterwards, Brennan Saeta from Coursera delivered an engaging story about how they scaled up their API over several years, starting with a static JSON blob and ending up with GraphQL:
Last segment: Panel, lightning talks, and Lee Byron
Right after a short break, there was a panel on how companies using GraphQL at scale and in production with:
- Kenton Jacobsen from Conde Nast
- Nick Nance from Credit Karma
- Mike Isman from Hudl
- Aaron Weiker from Concur
Apollo’s VP of Product Matt DeBergalis moderated.
Then, there was a round of 4 lightning talks about new open source projects using or making it easier to work with GraphQL:
Two other awesome lightning talks:
- Thunder, a GraphQL server for Go with live updates
- Gatsby, a static site generator looking to GraphQL for a data model
And, last but not (at all) least, Lee Byron, the maintainer and chief spokesman of the GraphQL specification and reference implementation, delivered his talk covering the history of GraphQL, best practices, and how it will grow in the future:
Conclusion
And that was the conference! After a reception on the roof, everyone headed home, thinking about how this GraphQL thing is bigger than any of us imagined!
All of the talks were recorded and will be posted on YouTube as soon as possible. If you’re hankering to meet more people from the community, make sure to subscribe to our San Francisco GraphQL meetup group:GraphQL San FranciscoGraphQL is Facebook’s new, open-source query language for fetching application data in a uniform way. Designed to solve…www.meetup.com
Oh, and in case you missed it in between all of the tweets…
