Holy crap! The ruby GraphQL hackathon was awesome!

Around 35 attendants and myself were hacking all day long on graphql-ruby with some awesome results. For newcomers we had a crash course on GraphQL from Robert Mosolgo himself, Graphql god at GitHub himself!

During the day we delivered some notable things:

• The team of Appsignal incorporated the first per field performance metrics for their performance product.
• Leaplines team made a new GraphQL-Ruby website, which will be launched shortly.
• Robert Mosolgo added some much needed tracing to the gem.
• I myself added a simple metrics dashboard as a Rails Engine.

We had some great speakers too, lets talk some key takeaways.

Impraise on “Mistakes with GraphQL (and how you can learn from it)”

• It may take some time for the team to switch from an REST mindset to a GraphQL mindset. Ensure that everyone has a decent understanding on GraphQL
• Train your team on what it means to be consume a graph.
• Let the API follows client demands, and be strict, and dint add any fields because you might need it in the future.

“How Appsignal uses GraphQL” – from the talented team at Appsignal

• Appsignal showed how they implemented their GraphQL API and how they expose a metrics heavy API.

“Securing a GraphQL API” from the people at HackerOne

• HackerOne shown how they’ve implemented column based security in the API

“How GitHub runs GraphQL”

• GitHub’s REST API’s also consume the GraphQL API. REST is an adapter and compatibility layer.
• Testing existing REST API’s data results with GraphQL API’s results is done using a gem called scientist.
• Even GitHub server side pages query the GraphQL API.
• The GraphQL API is acting as a funnel for all the data accessed via GitHub.

All the slides will be uploaded to speakerdeck soon.

Thanks everyone for participating! Looking forward to the next hackathon.