GraphQL Conf 2019 Berlin summary

GraphQL Conf took place on 20–21 June 2019 in Berlin, and as Vazco we are thrilled, that we decided to participate in this conference!

We’ve been working with GraphQL since early 2016. On the one hand, after 20 projects done in GraphQL for our Clients, we wanted to gain some latest knowledge and insights from people all over the world to improve our understanding of the GraphQL technology and the way we use it both in projects that we make for our Clients and in our in-house Open Source projects.

On the other hand, we wanted to meet people from the Open Source community and talk about exciting, global projects we plan to create.

Below you can find a short report from the 2019 GraphQL Conf written from five different perspectives.

Michał Zacher

The 2019 GraphQL conference in Berlin was first and foremost a great opportunity to meet many interesting people. The community is very open and welcoming, and talks between lectures may provide you with great ideas — we heard about many excellent approaches, solutions and tools. As Sashko Stubailo, one of the speakers, mentioned in a discussion, it would be tempting to meet with the community even without a conference — just to talk to inspiring people. We had a chance to speak about our OS packages, mainly uniforms, and to get constructive feedback and insights.

As for lectures, many were of good quality. My favourite one was Lee Byron’s insight into patterns migrating between different languages. We indeed are standing on the shoulders of giants, and seeing the development of GraphQL in time is an excellent way to understand how sharing experiences unfolds in action.

It was also worthwhile to hear from Sashko Stubailo about tooling he uses, and from James Baxley about Apollo Schema Federation not only because I’m interested in these topics but also because they were very professionally covered.

Overall, it was a great experience to come to Berlin, to hear and to talk with brilliant people. A real feast of knowledge :)

Maciej Stasiełuk

Attending conferences gives a unique opportunity to not only learn new things but also feel the vibe of the community. This is especially true in the case of such a welcoming and open community like GraphQL.

One of the favourite topics discussed by the participants behind the scenes was the adoption of GraphQL in their own organizations, with pitfalls and tips learned along the way.

I can recommend you the “Building custom GraphQL tooling for your team” talk given by Sashko Stubailo — a long time Apollo core team member, now working in Stripe. He does a great job with demystifying lower level graphql-tools and shows how you can use them to empower your workflow (hint: AST doesn’t bite!).

Another noteworthy issue discussed during the conference was the topic of SDL-first vs code-first approach. The talks given were leaning 2:1 towards code-first (Nexus and Prisma vs Tartiflette) when one of the speakers asked the attendees which method they used. When asked for a show of hand, about ⅔ of the audience raised hands in favour of the SDL-first approach. Both camps have some valid points, so I expect this discussion to continue among us in the foreseeable future.

Michał Weskida

There were many thought-provoking talks given at Berlin conference, but one of them particularly stood out and got me thinking. Sasha Solomon was talking about different approaches to handling GraphQL errors. But not in the way we usually think about it. The main point was to treat some errors as not errors at all. She called such errors “results”. It does make sense if you think about it. Aren’t the 500 Internal Error and one coming from the business logic completely different cases?

We shouldn’t treat a server downtime the same way as we treat the inability to fetch user’s data if their account is suspended. The latter is just a “result”, one of many possible, of the user’s data fetching. We should then define multiple possible outcomes for such query and handle them properly on the client side, throwing errors only if things get really bad. Sasha then presented implementation details and talked about how she had succeeded in introducing them into the Medium and Twitter codebase, as well as in making a shift in her colleagues’ mindsets about the matter.

Overall, the conference was a masterpiece. Excellent organisation, top-shelf speakers, and a passionate community eager to discuss any development-related matter. It’s undoubtedly an event worth visiting, be sure to check it out in the future if you have a chance.

Radosław Miernik

My favourite talk was “Infinite Backwards Compatibility” by Adam D. I. Kramer. While developing an app with a public API, it’s tough to convince its users to migrate to a new, better version. Shedding new light on some old ideas, like best-effort delivery, is very clever (and fresh) in terms of GraphQL and API development in general.

Nevertheless, talks themselves aren’t as important as talking to other people. Sharing your experiences, projects and encountered problems may be really inspiring. I got reassured that we weren’t the only ones with some issues and doubts. Getting in touch with people who develop tools you use daily may be a great experience too; saying “thanks” face-to-face feels far better than any comment in a merged pull request.

Tomasz Bacański

On the one hand, when we decided to participate 2019 GraphQL Conf in Berlin, we had clear goals: as a Meteor Prime Partner we wanted to meet with our great colleagues from Apollo and that was an excellent opportunity to be there, meet them and talk with them, and finally, to see some outstanding presentations given by people from all over the world.

But on the other hand, we wanted to show people our uniforms — simple tools for creating forms which we are very proud of. It’s always good to meet people who have some smart ideas to share and a global impact on things that you work with, and to speak with them about what you work on, or passion that you feel, or sometimes about other random things with a drink after the conference.

For me the most important was to understand how the most impact 3 GraphQL creators have right now on the community and in which direction it is moving. It was also nice to see the story behind them.

So if you had thought about participating in GraphQL in Berlin and you finally didn’t decide to go there, change your mind and go there next year! It’s a place where you can meet really great GraphQL and Open Source enthusiasts and feel the power of the Open Source Community. See you next year!