🎉 Thank You for an Amazing GraphQL Conf!
Videos from GraphQL Conf 2019 are live! Check out some of our favorite videos and ways to stay connected!
This year, on June 20th and 21st, 800 developers came together in Berlin for GraphQL Conf. A renamed successor to last year’s GraphQL Europe, GraphQL Conf was packed with incredible speakers, awesome deep dives, and was a great reunion for the warm GraphQL community!
This year’s GraphQL Conf covered the specifics of using GraphQL in production and at scale. Whether distributing a schema, or examining SDL vs Code-first approaches, the conference no longer needed to focus on selling coworkers on switching to GraphQL or how GraphQL compared against REST, as in the past. With companies now using GraphQL in production for years, conference talks were far more focused on best practices and doing even more with GraphQL.
We had an incredible time watching the event come together, and to keep the excitement going, and to give folks material to cover them until GraphQL Conf next year, we wanted to share some parting thoughts.
📺 Catch up on all the videos
The GraphQL Conf videos are now live! You can check out the full playlist on the Prisma Youtube Channel!
Going through the videos, the scale and variety of usage for GraphQL is evident. With a number of talks describing the handling data at the scale of Facebook to others offering a detailed presentation on specific aspects of how GraphQL works, the maturity of the GraphQL ecosystem was on full display.
Some of our favorite talks and presentations from the day included:
Sasha Solomon — 200 OK! Error Handling in GraphQL
We all know what happens in GraphQL when things are going well, but what happens when things don’t go so well? How do you handle errors in GraphQL? What is an error? Find out how not all ‘errors’ are errors, how we can have a better understanding of our data, and how to model domain errors in our GraphQL schema.
Nikolas Burk — Code-first GraphQL Server Development with Prisma
At Prisma, we have been highly involved with the GraphQL tooling ecosystem over the past few years. In this talk, we share our learnings from this time and present our perspective on best practices for GraphQL server development in 2019.
Marc-Andre Giroux — So You Want to Distribute Your GraphQL Schema
We’ve been hearing a lot on GraphQL being an amazing tool to enable distribution of services and APIs. Schema stitching, API Gateways, namespaces, schema modules; Are we on the right track? Let’s take a deep look at the role of GraphQL in a distributed architecture.
James Baxley — Apollo schema federation
GraphQL allows organizations to expose their data in a single graph, instead of as independent endpoints that require clients to be aware of service boundaries and to follow relationships between entities manually. Defining and deploying your data graph in a monolithic schema doesn’t scale however.
As GraphQL adoption within an organization grows, schema design shifts from being a single team responsibility to being an organization-wide concern. In this talk, I will introduce Apollo schema federation which is the evolution of schema stitching.
Lee Byron— We’re going to program like its 1999
The mental model for building for the web largely hasn’t changed in the last 20 years, but we’ve incorporated complexity, richness, grown our community a thousand fold, and scaled to billions. This year the web turns 30, and we look back at the steady march forward of better abstractions, better syntax, and better mental models that brought us here.
Honeypot— GraphQL Documentary
After the final talks wrapped up, the conference attendees had the chance to watch the premiere of Honeypot’s GraphQL documentary, which told the story of the invention of GraphQL and how it helped Facebook navigate a challenging move to mobile. The full documentary is now live!
🔖 Read the highlights
A number of folks have written summaries and their takeways from the event. Check out some of their coverage:
- Joel Bowen covered his Top Takeaways from GraphQL Conf 2019 (with a bonus, some of his reflections on Prisma Day as well)
- Pankaj Patel shared takeaways from various talks at the conference in his GraphQL Conf 2019 in a Nutshell
- Chris Grice summarized each talk at the conference as full page sketchnotes
- Tom Bacanski published GraphQL Conf 2019 Berlin Summary: 5 People’s Perspectives
- Rinky Goyal shared key takeways from GraphQL Conf Day 1 and Day 2
- Toni Vaakanainen shared his expeirence in his piece: Go to (developer) conferences!
Did you write a summary not listed here? Reach out and we’ll get it added.
🗺 Stay connected with the GraphQL community
Even though GraphQL Conf has passed, there are a number of GraphQL events still coming up this year:
- August 8th: Restless London, a new London GraphQL Meetup
- September 6th: GraphQL Day Bodensee
- October 29–31: GraphQL Summit
- GraphQL Meetups around the world
You can also stay in the loop on what’s happening with the GraphQL community with the GraphQL Weekly newsletter. 🗞
🤗 Thank you to the entire community!
GraphQL Conf was an amazing experience and it could not have happened without everyone’s involvement. A huge thank you to all of the speakers, everyone who submitted a CFP, the incredible CFP reviewers, and all the individuals who worked so hard to bring this conference come to life.
Most of all, thank you to the overall GraphQL community that keeps this amazing technology moving forward and the attendees without whom the conference could not possibly exist.
👋 See you next year! It’ll be here before you know it!
