You were awesome GraphQL Europe 🇪🇺
I’m sat waiting to board one of my two flights from Berlin to England and not only am I reflecting on GraphQL Europe but what has been a rollercoaster ride with React since the beginning of the year.
In the beginning my brain and the magic of GraphQL just didn’t seem to get each other. This went on for many months. Why would anyone drop REST in favour of GraphQL? SOAP I’d understand! 😏
I’d spent months seeing GraphQL popup in conversations on Twitter and it big companies like GitHub and Spotify were allocating teams to work on this implementation, so I knew it was time I joined in.
I had no idea where to begin and if I should be using Relay or Apollo. Relay seemed to do too much but Apollo appeared to do too little. It was super cool to hear others I met at GraphQL Europe went through the same thing. I was also super happy when Jonas Helfer touched on this during his keynote.
#JuniorDevForLife right?
Sashko Stubailo presented a brilliant talk on adding GraphQL to your existing architecture. A large chunk of examples with React & GraphQL today often show how to get started but leave out the real world problems.
Quite often that’s for us as a developer to “figure out”. Using GraphQL in development is very different to what it’s actually like in production but that shouldn’t stop you from diving in and getting started with GraphQL in your existing projects.
Everyone at Graphcool & Honeypot did a fantastic job organising this conference. Chad Fowler also did a great job as MC, even if he did drop some Trump & Rails jokes.
HUGE THANKS to Johannes and Lee Byron for taking the time to listen to my experience and ideas.
If you are a frontend developer and you want to learn GraphQL, you should learn Apollo Client and leave the backend to Graphcool. This should get you from zero to hero quickly!
Now what are you waiting for? Get started with GraphQL today! You might find the following repos quite helpful to get started.
Can’t wait to attend GraphQL Europe next year! 🎉
