8 Things I Learned At Apollo Day NYC 2019
Apollo Day NYC is a one-day conference that brings together an incredible community of engineers from all over the world with diverse backgrounds and experiences to talk and learn about Apollo and GraphQL.
This year’s conference started with some exciting new announcements from Matt DeBergalis (Apollo’s CTO), James Baxley (a leading software engineer working on new Apollo products), and Peggy Rayzis (a developer experience advocate for Apollo). They introduced a few really cool features Apollo recently released as well as ones in the pipeline for the coming months.
Here are the top 8 things I learned from Apollo Day NYC 2019:
#1 Community
Apollo is internalizing what it means to be open source. Everything they do feels inclusive and they make a strong effort to cultivate an open and honest community. They even printed a survey url on the back of our badges to collect feedback about the conference format. They are obviously putting in a lot of effort to create a vibrant community around their tools and technologies. It’s refreshing to be a part of an active community that highly values feedback from their members.
#2 Incremental Adoption
One of the most attractive things about using Apollo and GraphQL is that you can adopt it piece by piece and use it in conjunction with your existing APIs. This aligns nicely with the agile product development methodologies that are popular today. It also provides engineers with a very low barrier to entry to adopt Apollo and GraphQL on top of their existing infrastructures.
To demonstrate the power of incremental adoption, Apollo brought out OKCupid engineers to talk about their experience adopting Apollo and GraphQL on top of their legacy application, which is almost 15 years old.
#3 The New Modern Stack is Here
Matt, the CTO of Apollo, opened the conference with an overview of the technology community and where he sees us in the next 5–10 years. He talked about the resilience of popular technologies like React and Typescript; it soon became apparent that GraphQL and Apollo are among the final missing pieces in completing the modern web stack in 2019. Armed with React, Typescript and Apollo/GraphQL, your product teams can move quicker, you can recruit top engineering talent more easily and retain engineers on your team by providing them with technologies that prioritize developer experience and happiness. Which leads nicely into my next point…
#4 Developer Experiences Are Very, Very Important
Peggy Rayzis from Apollo gave a wonderful talk about the new developer experience tools within the Apollo community. One of the exciting new tools was a VS code plugin that estimated the runtime of your GraphQL queries.
Day to day, I usually don’t think about the business implications of developer experiences, but it’s an incredibly important topic. Would you rather work at a company where your entire day is filled with uninspiring technologies that are slow and outdated? No. No one does.
Creating an environment that your developers love to work in everyday is going to help your business. You will retain top talent and you will keep the developers you have from quitting and going somewhere else. This is clearly a top priority for Apollo and, as a developer, I love it.
#5 No Egos Here
One of the most impressive moments from the conference was when Apollo’s CTO, Matt DeBergalis, explained how they missed the mark with a feature called schema stitching, a technique intended for helping isolated teams scale together within a single data graph.
The fact that Matt was so open about their missed attempt was impressive. Not many companies admit their mistakes in open forums. Apollo seems determined to get this scaling issue right this time with more community involvement and shortening the loop between internal development and community feedback. If you’ve tried schema stitching and found it didn’t work well for you, then you’re going to be excited about this new approach.
#6 One Application-Wide Data Graph at Scale
Imagine you’re working with hundreds of engineers and have to maintain a single application-wide data graph that teams are changing and updating constantly. You can see how that could get pretty unmanageable.
The Apollo team made some exciting announcements about their new federation approach, which will allow you to assign partial data graphs to the teams that work on them and compose them together in a scalable way.
Without getting too far into the details, this new approach to graph composition is very reminiscent of SQL and foreign key type associations and will be familiar to developers who have previous experience in those technologies. This seems like an exciting new development and possibly the next step for Apollo becoming widely adopted within enterprise software companies implementing microservice architectures.
#7 Product First, Not Data First
Apollo is focused on building technology that accelerates your product development. Its architecture assumes that you prioritize your product needs instead of your data organization. What does that mean? Well, Apollo and GraphQL work exceptionally well if the frontend product teams drive the adoption of the technology. That’s because Apollo and GraphQL are built to deliver data based on the needs of your product and not your backend architecture.
Apollo is a technology that guides you to build better products. Alongside Typescript and React, Apollo and GraphQL will keep you honest when building products and serve as the foundation for your team’s success. It all starts and ends with the product.
#8 GraphQL is A Linux Foundation Supported Technology
GraphQL is now an official Linux Foundation supported technology. This is phenomenal news for the future of the GraphQL spec. Having the underlying GraphQL technology supported by a professional organization that will account for the needs of the community and not arbitrary business goals is an amazing thing.
This gives me hope for the future of GraphQL, Apollo, and open source.
Thanks for making it to the end of this article; you are a champ. If you enjoyed it at all, please smash the clap button and leave a comment on what excites you most about the future of GraphQL and Apollo.
My name is Stephen and I’m a Software Engineer at AdHawk. We are always looking for talented engineers to join our fast growing team. Take a look at our job board and apply today -> https://www.tryadhawk.com/jobs/
