GraphQL has helped the industry realize the benefit of having typed APIs. But does that mean that if we switch over to a typed API like gRPC or OpenAPI then GraphQL is overkill? In this session, I want to discuss how GraphQL with Relay is critical to UI development and how GraphQL without Relay leads us to reinvent the wheel on state management and API libraries again and again. And also as a corollary, how using GraphQL without Relay might not really be worth it!

Curious about how a consumer-grade social application’s data architecture has been designed? Taz will review the end-to-end GraphQL architecture used at Guild. Everything from Relay to Persisted Operations cached on Cloudflare Workers to efficient Postgres schema resolution. The session is intended to be half show-and-tell and half open discussion with the audience.

GraphQL can be challenging, and not only for beginners. The reason for this is often that it's so tempting to do the wrong thing. In this session, I will walk you through the various challenges of building production-ready applications with GraphQL. We will discuss the differences between a public GraphQL server and a private GraphQL server. I will show the most common mistakes people encounter with GraphQL and how to tackle them.

In this talk, we will look at persisted operations, rate-limiting, introspection security, the right defaults for paging, errors, and many more aspects. This talk is suitable for you whether you are a GraphQL server or client implementer or just a user of GraphQL. After this session, you should have a solid understanding of how to put GraphQL into production in a secure way.

Ever wonder about the full data stack powering Guild? Taz will give you an in-depth show & tell of the end-to-end architecture, covering everything from:

• Database: how Postgres is used to manage & authorize deeply interconnected social data
• GraphQL server: how that Postgres database gets transformed into GraphQL
• GraphQL Persisted Operations: security & efficiency gains implemented on the server
• Fine-grained caching: how all data provided via GraphQL is cached for read-after-write consistency
• Server-side rendering: ensuring there isn't reflows / loading spinners/ re-rendering on initial load due to data fetching
• Client-side rendering: efficiently fetching data via Relay
• Data catalog: using GraphQL as a data catalog, to power all data fetching across Guild (i.e. not only the web app that you'd expect)