GraphQL End to End: Your First Query in 20 minutes

Eeshan Sawant, Ayush More

In this session we will walk you through GraphQL from the very beginning. No prior knowledge needed. We will cover what GraphQL is, how it solves real problems that REST APIs struggle with, and how to write your first query. We will also do a live demo so you can see it working in real time, and not only on slides.

By the end of this session you will understand what GraphQL is, why developers and companies use it, and how to start exploring it yourself.

Scaling GraphQL in Production: N+1, Latency, and Java Virtual Threads

Hasnain Ahmed Shaikh

Moving from REST to GraphQL can provide a more flexible API experience, but operating GraphQL at scale introduces its own set of performance and architectural challenges.

In this talk, we’ll explore practical lessons from building and scaling GraphQL-based customer experiences across multiple marketplaces and languages. We’ll examine how N+1 query patterns can create unexpected latency spikes, how P90 and P99 metrics reveal performance issues that averages can hide, and how resolver and API design choices affect real-world performance.

We’ll then look at Java virtual threads and how they can improve concurrency for I/O-heavy workloads, while also discussing why concurrency improvements alone cannot solve inefficient query patterns or poor GraphQL architecture.

The goal is to provide practical guidance for engineers moving from REST to GraphQL and designing GraphQL services that can perform reliably at production scale.