🇳🇱 Interviewing GraphQL Day Speakers (I)

GraphQL Day is happening on April 14 in Amsterdam — a mini-conference with awesome talks and a hands-on workshop.

Today, we are going to introduce three of the nine developers who will be speaking at GraphQL Day. Read on to get to know them personally as well as their relationships to GraphQL.

Grab your ticket for GraphQL Day soon. You can use this discount code to get 25% off the ticket price: ams18-gqlday

Martijn Walraven, Product Manager at Apollo

I’m Martijn Walraven, product manager for Apollo Engine. I’ve been working on GraphQL at Apollo for the last two years, mostly on the open source team. Among other things, I started the Apollo iOS and Apollo codegen projects.

Your talk at GraphQL Day will be about building GraphQL APIs over existing backends. Why do do you think companies might want go down this route and wrap their backends with GraphQL?

My talk at GraphQL Day will be about building GraphQL APIs over existing backends. Although you sometimes have the luxury of starting from scratch, many people have existing REST APIs and other services they need to integrate with. A big benefit of GraphQL is that it allows you to unify data that lives in different silos in one schema. There is no need to rewrite your backends to get there, even if that were possible. I believe GraphQL is at its strongest as a technology for building gateways, by offering you a well-structured and typed way of orchestrating access to disparate services.

What are some tips and tools you can share for companies who want to use GraphQL as a proxy for their backends but don’t know where to start?

I will discuss best practices around interacting with REST APIs in particular, including a discussion of the various ways you may want to approach caching. Another topic of interest is modularity, and the related idea of schema stitching. Rather than thinking of your GraphQL API as a monolith, it sometimes makes sense to break up your schema and have different teams be responsible for their own part.

Sara Vieira, Frontend Engineer at YLD.io

Yellow 👋 My name is Sara, I am a frontend developer from the middle of nowhere in Portugal, you know us, we won the Euro two years ago? Yeah, that was a thing.

I love weird punk music, horror movies, travelling, football, code and my cat Rayman.

As a frontend developer, how has GraphQL impacted your dayjob?

I think I can say it saved my sanity, I handle data requests and creating servers with happiness now.

Before GraphQL was a thing I barely knew how to make anything more than a simple Express/Hapi server with a couple of endpoints and it always involved a lot of googling and keyboard punching.

With things like graphql-yoga and graphql-tools, I actually enjoy building servers and seeing those queries and mutations on the Playground.

As a frontend developer GraphQL and Apollo was the best thing we could ever ask for when it comes to data fetching and handling all the intermittent states when getting it, no more loading actions and reducers left us with so much time to make the web better !

I also feel like I owe a lot to Graphcool as How to GraphQL was what thought me GraphQL in the beginning and made me see the awesomeness !

Redux or apollo-link-state? 😏

I’m very biased in this question as I was scrolling Peggy’s post at 10PM on a train when it got released and immediately got my laptop out to try the wizardry of apollo-link-state!

I have also never been a huge fan of redux and instead always favoured Mobx in that aspect and now I feel like the stack is perfect, Mobx for what does not use GraphQL and gql all the things when using it.

Are you really scared of meeting Ken Wheeler ?

Yes.

Ruben Verborgh, Professor of Semantic Web technology at University of Ghent

I’m a researcher at Ghent University — imec, focusing on publishing and querying decentralizing data on the Web. My goal is to build a new generation of Web apps, in which data is no longer confined to application boundaries. Think of it as inviting your LinkedIn colleagues via a tweet to join your Facebook event scheduled through Doodle. And you own your data.

What is Linked Data and what role does it play in the above?

Linked Data is about publishing data on the Web in a way that facilitates reuse by others. With Linked Data, meaning and context are interwoven with the data. That way, other people and apps can make sense of my data, even though I published it completely independently. By creating my stuff as Linked Data, I can start writing things in one app and seamlessly read them in another — all while remaining in control of where I store my data and who can access it.

How does Linked Data relate to GraphQL in terms of the problems they’re trying to solve and the implementation?

Accessing Linked Data also happens through querying: decentralized applications read and write the data they need through the SPARQL query language. So our APIs follow a similar philosophy.

There are two important differences though. First, SPARQL queries have a meaning that is independent of a concrete database or schema. So I can take any SPARQL query and execute it on any Linked Data source. Second, I can execute SPARQL queries across multiple sources simultaneously, to find combined answers that none of these sources could provide individually. This is because Linked Data is fundamentally about data integration from multiple, heterogeneous sources.

What will you bring to GraphQL Day?

We are building a new generation of apps using decentralized query technology. The twist is that those queries could be executed anywhere in the network: they might run entirely on the client or be spread across multiple servers, and the app doesn’t even need to know. This is a fundamental rethinking of the relation between apps, data, and queries — and I’m eager to discuss this idea with the GraphQL community.

🙌 Get your tickets now

Early-bird tickets are already sold out! Be sure to grab your ticket for the event soon — special perk, GraphQL Day attendees get a free ticket to join the ReactAmsterdam after-party on Friday night 🎉

Use this discount code to get 25% off the ticket price: ams18-gqlday

Stay tuned for part II of our interview series!