January 2017 Summaries

Apollo Contributor Week is an online hack week for anyone looking to make contributions to Apollo and related projects, with the core maintainers on deck throughout the week to provide help, design feedback, quick PR reviews, and emotional support. The event aims to welcome new contributors, existing ones, and past contributors alike, allowing them to contribute to Apollo's growth and leave their mark on a rapidly growing open source project. Contributions can span everything from code changes to improving documentation and blog posts. Daily office hours with core maintainers, contribution ideas for all skill levels, new contributing docs, and improved Apollo tools are just some of the exciting aspects of this event. The week will kick off on February 7th with a YouTube Live hangout to brainstorm project ideas and answer questions, followed by a series of resources and updates to help participants get started.

This article discusses the author's experience building an open-source project, Apollo Client, a GraphQL client for JavaScript. The author shares lessons learned from their journey, including the importance of getting off the ground, getting the word out, making it easy to understand, and empowering contributors. They highlight the challenges of building an open-source project, such as finding the first user and contributor, but also emphasize the rewards of success in terms of community engagement and contributions. The author shares specific strategies for overcoming these challenges, including writing blog posts, creating demo code, and responding to issues and pull requests promptly. Ultimately, the article concludes by encouraging readers to join the open-source community and contribute to projects that align with their interests.

The Webpack loader for GraphQL documents has been updated to allow users to import fragment definitions from other .graphql files, making it easier to share fragments across multiple queries. This feature is achieved through the use of a preprocessor called graphql-tag/loader, which converts GraphQL comments into require statements and parses the resulting code. With this update, developers can now place their GraphQL query documents in separate files, outside of their view component definitions, and share fragments across those documents without having to import them separately within their JavaScript code. This feature is particularly useful for building tools such as persisted queries, which will be supported by the loader soon.

The Query reporting page in Optics has been upgraded to provide a more authentic and interactive visualization of request distribution data. The new bar chart design allows users to easily view duration bucket details, navigate between different trace samples, identify important percentiles, and compare query distributions. This upgrade also emphasizes the percentile of each duration bucket and makes important request metadata accessible. Additionally, the tabs on the Query page have been redesigned to prioritize user needs, with basic stats now shown in the page header. The new design aims to provide a better understanding of real-world endpoint latencies and improve overall user experience.

The NewSpring Church, a Southern Baptist megachurch in South Carolina, was facing challenges with its rapidly growing presence and multiple locations. The church's technical team had to manage various internal and third-party solutions to keep everything running, but this led to a distributed data system that was not in sync. To address this issue, the team decided to adopt GraphQL as their new technology stack. They were concerned about GraphQL's support for the future, speed, and protecting sensitive user data. However, with the help of Apollo Optics, which provided system analytics, the team was able to identify issues and optimize queries, making it easier to implement GraphQL projects from prototype to production. With GraphQL and Optics in place, the NewSpring team is now looking forward to implementing new features such as subscriptions and transitioning their server to C#.