Peggy Rayzis is the engineering manager at Apollo, where she leads the developer experience team.

Peggy talks about how Apollo touches every layer of development. There are a lot of ways that you can implement GraphQL in your application. It's incredibly flexible. You can even have GraphQL running entirely on the front-end! Peggy recommends that you implement it in your existing application by creating a GraphQL layer that sits between your front-end and underlying services.

Why would it be worth all of the effort to refactor your application from a REST architecture to a GraphQL one? There are performance benefits from switching to GraphQL, but the main draw is the developer experience. GraphQL is much nicer to work with than REST, no more firing up Postman or console logging to get a peek at what's going on.

To get started with GraphQL, Peggy recommends taking a single endpoint in your application and beginning with a schema, then move on to writing your resolvers, get your server running, and then connect your front-end. If you want to learn on something that isn't your product, then Apollo has excellent documentation that is linked bellow.

A Few Excellent Reasons For Why Should Give GraphQL A Try With Peggy Rayzis

Resources

Guest: Peggy Rayzis

Host: Kent C. Dodds