August 2021 Summaries

The text discusses best practices for schema stewardship in GraphQL development. It highlights four organizing models: Siloed, Graph Guild, Central Graph Team, and Hybrid. The Siloed model is the most common, but it can lead to a bottleneck as teams develop their own schemas without coordination. The Graph Guild model improves sharing and learning, while the Central Graph Team model centralizes expertise but creates a dependency on a single team. The Hybrid model partners local experts with a central team, scaling the review process and distributing expertise. The text also covers best practices for scaling schema reviews, adopting a product mindset, and keeping moving forward. It emphasizes the importance of collaboration, iteration, and empathy in achieving strategic outcomes and avoiding the tragedy of the commons.

To make a GraphQL request using HTTP methods, you can use either the POST or GET method. When making a POST request, you need to pass the `query`, `operationName`, and `variables` properties in the JSON body of the request. On the other hand, when making a GET request, each property is provided as an HTTP query parameter separated by an ampersand. The main limitation of using the GET method is that it doesn't support variables or mutation operations. Both methods have their own nuances and limitations, but they can be used to send GraphQL requests.

The importance of adopting a stewardship mindset in managing GraphQL schemas, understanding the unique experiences and perspectives of each team involved, assuming good intent when sharing new ideas, leaning into the friction that arises from competing visions for the graph, and adopting a client-centric mindset are key best practices for effective schema stewardship. These principles aim to create a collaborative process that balances the needs of all parties involved, avoids creating a process bottleneck, and ultimately leads to better outcomes for customers and the organization as a whole. By embracing these best practices, teams can work together to define, evolve, and improve their GraphQL schemas, leading to a unified representation of data, services, and digital capabilities that meets the needs of all stakeholders.

The DX Audits framework is a structured approach to developer advocacy, designed to help developer advocates (DAs) document, report, and address product friction. The framework consists of four phases: Discovery, Building, Reporting, and Implementation. In the Discovery phase, DAs gather feedback and input from various sources to identify use cases that need investigation or have caused friction for developers. In the Building phase, DAs complete friction logs by building projects that allow them to experience the use cases they want to audit. The Reporting phase involves organizing discoveries into a report to share with stakeholders and the company at large. Finally, in the Implementation phase, DAs work on action items from the audit and advocate for product changes. The framework aims to provide structure, consistency, and accountability to developer advocacy, making it easier to onboard new advocates and achieve success.

Apollo has raised $130M in funding, valuing the company at over $1.5B, to pioneer open-source graph technology for app developers. The graph is a new layer of the stack that solves the problem of data plumbing code connecting apps to backend microservices, allowing client developers to write a single GraphQL query to fetch all the data they need. With 86% of JavaScript developers ranking GraphQL as the top technology they want to learn and over 17M monthly open-source downloads, Apollo has become a trusted solution for developers. The company plans to use the funding to create more open-source software, expand its offerings such as Apollo Federation, scale its team, and collaborate with the community on new projects. With a mission to help app developers help the world, Apollo is committed to advancing the graph technology and making it accessible to everyone.

We prepare our interviewers internally by creating alignment and ensuring a consistent process, which helps create fairness in the hiring process. This is achieved through various steps such as defining the role, designing interviews that test for critical skills and attributes, and preparing interviewers to assess these competencies. We also put our candidates in the best position to succeed by providing them with information about the company, its culture, and the interview process through blurbs and organization of everything. Our goal is to empower our candidates to make informed decisions and provide them with the necessary information to evaluate whether Apollo is the right fit for them.

Apollo Studio Explorer is a powerful web IDE for creating, running, and managing GraphQL operations, offering several features that may have been overlooked by developers. One of the key benefits is its ability to manage multiple operations independently in a single tab, making it easier to test and debug complex queries. The explorer also offers table layout for response data, allowing users to view arrays of data in a more intuitive format. Additionally, editor hints provide metadata about each field in an operation, helping developers optimize their queries and identify potential performance issues. Other features include the ability to copy links to operations, inline and extract variables, and toggle between different notation formats. These features enhance the overall usability and functionality of Apollo Studio Explorer, making it a valuable tool for GraphQL developers.

Audit Logs now available in Apollo Studio Enterprise, providing visibility into key actions taken within an organization, helping with graph governance and compliance requirements. The feature allows users to export a data file with specific actions taken by individuals or automated systems, including creating graphs, publishing schema, provisioning users, and adjusting settings. Audit logs are accessible via the new Audit tab in Apollo Studio UI, offering filtering options for exports, and are available as part of the Studio Enterprise plan.

OpenTelemetry is an open-source observability framework for cloud-native software that provides visibility into what your code is doing during a request, regardless of how it's distributed across machines. It uses spans and traces to instrument workloads, collect data, and export information about the performance and reliability of a federated GraphQL request. As of version 0.31.1, Apollo Gateway natively supports OpenTelemetry as part of its complete picture of the performance and reliability of a federated GraphQL request. This allows users to debug or optimize a request as it travels through all layers of their stack, including client, Apollo Gateway, subgraph services, and databases. OpenTelemetry works with Apollo Studio to give users a complete picture of their graph, providing declarative schema checks and alerting on potentially breaking changes. It also integrates with various APM tools and cloud provider solutions, allowing users to export traces into different systems for viewing or searching.