GraphQL Berlin Meetup #26 - a BBQ event + quiz with prizes 😎

The next edition of the GraphQL Berlin Meetup is coming up! 😎😊

Come join us for a summer evening of quality talks, networking, and a barbecue - veggie and vegan options provided. 🍹🌭

Please follow the 3G rule (“geimpft, getestet, genesen – vaccinated, tested, recovered”).

During this meetup, we will run an interactive quiz. Listen to the talks closely and answer the questions for a chance to win a copy of the "Production Ready GraphQL" book by Marc-Andre Giroux, and other prizes! 🎁

We will be giving out colored stickers to help you indicate how comfortable you are with in-person contact:

🟢 choose the green sticker if you are happy to connect and chat with the other attendees,
🟡 choose the yellow sticker if you're open to joining the conversation but cautious,
🔴 choose the red sticker if you'd rather enjoy the meetup alone.

The talks will be recorded and there will be a photographer onsite. Please let us know in advance if you do not want to appear in the photos.

🕰 Schedule:

◭ 6:30 - Doors open, time for snacks 🌮
◭ 7:00 - Welcome and announcements 🤝
◭ 7:10 - 🎙 "Are you using GraphQL the intended way?" - Laurin Quast (The Guild)
◭ 7:30 - Q&A + quiz + announcements from Prisma
◭ 7:55 - 🎙 The future of GraphQL IDEs - Rikki Schulte (GraphQL Foundation) and Thomas Heyenbrock (Stellate)
◭ 8:15 - Q&A + quiz
◭ 8:35 - Break + snacks 🌭
◭ 8:50 - 🎙 "Do not break GraphQL, extend it!" - Paolo Insogna (NearForm)
◭ 9:10 - Q&A + quiz announcement! 🎁
◭ 9:25 - Hang out and chat 🤗
◭ 10:00 - Doors close 👋

🎙 Laurin Quast (The Guild) - "Are you using GraphQL the intended way?"

GraphQL is a technology whose adoption grows constantly. More and more enterprise-grade companies start investigating and betting on it. Today there are many different tools for building a GraphQL API, whether from scratch or by generating it from an existing database or REST API. You can solve API ownership by federating your schema. It is obvious that GraphQL is here to stay. Interestingly, a lot of the use-cases for GraphQL today differ from its original purpose when first developed by Facebook. Let's have a tour through how the use-cases evolved and whether you are using GraphQL the intended way.

Laurin Quast is a developer that started exploring GraphQL, by leading the private and later public API development at a start-up. Realizing that there are still many unsolved problems and challenges within the space, he started contributing to famous JavaScript libraries, such as GraphQL Code Generator and GraphQL Tools. Diving deeper and deeper, the transition into becoming a full-time open-source developer at The Guild was inevitable.

🎙- Rikki Schulte (GraphQL Foundation) and Thomas Heyenbrock (Stellate) - "The future of GraphQL IDEs"

Every developer that has ever used GraphQL has written a query in GraphiQL and it’s become one of the most widely used tools in the GraphQL ecosystem. Also, other implementations like the GraphQL Playground have become very popular in recent years and added lots of value in terms of what GraphQL IDEs can do. In 2020, the GraphQL Playground was handed over to the GraphQL Foundation, and the work on combining the best of both worlds started. Let’s explore the brand new design of the upcoming GraphiQL v2 and where we want to take the project in the future!

Thomas is working at Stellate (formerly GraphCDN) as a software engineer, working pretty much full-stack from front to back. He originally studied maths, then started doing data science, and got diverted into programming and web development over time. Outside of work, Thomas is a certified skiing instructor.

🎙 Paolo Insogna (NearForm) - "Do not break GraphQL, extend it!"

GraphQL is a powerful technology to retrieve and send complex structures from remote locations with a simple and effective syntax. One of its perks is avoiding under-fetching and over-fetching as the client specifically requests the fields it’s interested in.

But what happens if we need to enrich or customize the data set and we can’t modify the upstream GraphQL server? Shall we break the spec?
In this talk, I will show you how to use the resources the GraphQL specification already gives us to solve this issue without having to break the rules.

Paolo is a Node.js Core Member, Senior Developer Experience Engineer at NearForm, Full-Stack Expert, and Polyglot Developer. RPG and LARP addicted and nerd on a lot more. From Campobasso, Italy.

See you there! 👋