The One with GraphQL

We talked about GraphQL in our Architecture Community of Practice today. The CoP is currently organised in a Lean Coffee-like format and one of our newest engineers came to the CoP with the question how we are using GraphQL at jobvalley and why we have decided to use mainly GraphQL for our APIs.

We then talked a bit about the history of our APIs, JSON with and without Schemas, how we started using GraphQL for server-to-server communication and then started using it for client-server communication as well and what some of the benefits of using GraphQL over something like gRPC are for our specific use cases.

I tried to take some meeting notes but it was very difficult. I still haven’t really grasped what GraphQL is about although I have now been in a team that uses it both inside our Rails application for communicating with Vue.js components and for backend communication with another team’s application. Funnily enough, I started the Pluralsight Path for GraphQL (again, cough) yesterday, without knowing we would talk about GraphQL today. But I have only watched the introduction so far and I don’t know if that’s the right format for me to learn more about GraphQL. I don’t know what is though. Any ideas?