Mini Workshop: Intro to GraphQL

Hi JSLovers and HAPPY 2019!

we are going to start this year with a mini-workshop on GraphQL, the event will be held in the new Monzo HQ with 2 Microsoft evangelist explaining the power of GraphQL.
IMPORTANT: Please bring your own laptop for following the workshop.
The event is going to start at 6.30pm and will end at 9.30pm please come around 6pm so we can start on time!!!
The capacity is limited therefore please please please make sure you can come to the event!!!

Intro to GraphQL
Current trends in software and backend architecture have been evolving towards a more loosely coupled more granular design. I am sure most of you have heard of microservice based architectures. The latest development on that front in the past couple of years has been the advent of serverless which allows you to run applications in very cost effective ephemeral services. This is why it is important to have a proper gateway for your API that is able to route all your requests to the designated endpoint.
GraphQL stands out in that respect as being a mature open sourced standard started at Facebook. We will first have a look at how we set up our own GraphQL server locally, then we will explore the Query language and schema definitions it provides which allows you essentially query your mesh of services from a single point of entry. The beauty of that is it will notify you early if any of your endpoints is misbehaving or the schemas are out of date by erroring out. Another advantage of this is that it allows for your API documentation to be a real time process and it will give you what one may call an API playground where you can query and explore your API.
After we explore our serverless API we will have a look at the more advanced features and standards around mutators and resolvers and then we will close by going all in, full serverless and deploy our graphql server to a function in the cloud.

Finally, to test our API we'll use clients like a React and Xamarin app.

The speakers:

Simona Cotin is a web developer with a passion for teaching. She spends most of her time tinkering with JavaScript in the cloud and sharing her experience with other developers at community events like meetups and conferences or online. As a Cloud Developer Advocate, Simona engages with the web community to help create a great developer experience with Azure. She loves shipping code to production and has built network data analytics platforms using Angular, Typescript, React, and Node.

Brandon Minnik works as a Developer Advocate at Microsoft. Specializing in mobile app development, Brandon gets to work closely with the developer community and help fellow mobile app developers make 5-star apps.
An avid mobile app developer, Brandon loves to code and has contributed to and published countless apps!