March Meetup @ Digitec Galaxus

Join us for our next GraphQL Meetup on March 12th in Zürich!

The event will start at 6:00 PM, with time for networking and the first talk beginning at 6:30 PM. Location, drinks, and food are generously provided by Digitec Galaxus.

If you’d like to host one of our future events, please reach out to us at contact@chillicream.com.

The event will be hybrid. We strongly encourage you to join us in person for the full experience, but we will also provide a livestream for remote attendees. When you sign up, please let us know whether you’ll attend in person or online.

Schedule
18:00 – 18:30
Welcome & Networking

18:30 – 19:00

GraphQL Batching: DataLoaders and Batch Resolvers Explained - Michael Staib

GraphQL servers rely on batching to avoid the N+1 problem, but where should batching actually happen?

In this talk, we explore three common approaches: DataLoaders, Batch Resolvers, and breadth-first (BFS) execution. While all aim to reduce redundant data fetching, they solve different problems and live at different layers of your stack.

We will examine how each approach works, when to use one over the other, and how modern GraphQL servers implement batching under the hood. Along the way, we will look at practical execution details like field merging and batching across multiple operations.

By the end, you will have a clear mental model for GraphQL batching and the trade-offs between DataLoaders, Batch Resolvers, and BFS execution.

19:00 – 19:30

Semantic Introspection - Pascal Senn

GraphQL's rich type system makes it an ideal foundation for agents to explore and work with APIs.
The SDL provides the structure agents need to reason about capabilities and data.
Queries let them retrieve information, while mutations enable them to take action.

In practice, however, production GraphQL schemas are often too large to fit in the context window and difficult to understand without additional context.
So what if agents could interact with any GraphQL API in a generic, reliable way?
In this session, we'll look at the challenges of agentic interactions with GraphQL and how semantic introspection could unlock a new way for agents to navigate the schema and interact with GraphQL APIs more reliably.

19:30 – 20:00

The Future of GraphQL Federation: Composite Schemas in action - Tobias Tengler

GraphQL federation enables teams to compose multiple services into a single unified API. But the federation ecosystem is evolving.

In this talk, we introduce the GraphQL Composite Schema specification, a new open standard developed under the GraphQL Foundation and co-created by Apollo, The Guild, and ChilliCream. Rather than introducing yet another competing approach, the Composite Schemas specification aims to standardize and modernize GraphQL federation by addressing limitations of earlier federation protocols.

We will explore how GraphQL APIs can be federated using Composite Schemas and how queries are planned and executed across services. Along the way, we will demonstrate the first implementation of the specification with Hot Chocolate Fusion 16 and share some of the design decisions behind it.

By the end, you will understand what Composite Schemas are, how they improve GraphQL federation, and how to start using them with Fusion.