GraphQLConf 2026
2026-05-19..2026-05-20
Fremont, United States
[GraphQLConf 2023, GraphQLConf 2024, GraphQLConf 2025, GraphQLConf 2026]
as the organisers put it
Join the official GraphQL Conference by the GraphQL Foundation in Fremont, California, from May 19-20, 2026. Discover the future of GraphQL with leading experts, workshops, and networking opportunities.
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Built to Evolve: 13 Years of GraphQL | Elena Bukareva, Braxton Bragg | 21m |
Meta explains why GraphQL needs new ecosystem primitives: the canonical schema is massive (49 MB SDL = 12–15 million tokens while largest AI context is ~1… | ||
| Big Graphs, Tiny Contexts: Dev Tools for Agents | Stephen Spalding, Kavitha Srinivasan | 29m |
Netflix runs a federated enterprise graph about 4 Shakespeares (~4M tokens) spanning roughly 1,000 subgraphs from hundreds of teams, so agents can never ingest… | ||
| React Server Components Vs. GraphQL | Jordan Eldredge | 21m |
Claims that React Server Components originated as a Relay prototype at Meta and that RSCs and GraphQL both expose the same model layer and avoid network… | ||
| Shopify's Breadth-First Bet: Rethinking GraphQL Execution | Greg MacWilliam | 30m |
Shopify rewrites GraphQL execution to run breadth-first resolvers instead of depth-first, batching each selection across all objects so five fields over 100… | ||
| An Alternative To JSON Responses: Argo in WhatsApp | Kevin Gorham | 29m |
WhatsApp replaces JSON responses with a GraphQL-aware binary format called Argo binary serialization, implementing server encoders and client decoders (Erlang… | ||
| Teach Yourself GraphQL in 2026: An Anti-blueprint | Jeff Auriemma | 28m |
Generates a 66-line dream query with an agent (Claude) then auto-creates a matching schema, stub resolvers and Express backing services so the query actually… | ||
| Lightning Talk: Resolvers Everywhere: Rethinking Client and Server Boundaries in GraphQL | J. Cheng | 08m |
Argues that GraphQL execution can live on clients and demonstrates Meta’s Relay Resolvers: client-defined fields that fetch an encrypted blob via a fragment… | ||
| Lightning Talk: Breaking up With Inputs (Without Breaking Your Users) | Laurin Quast | 13m |
Shows concrete tooling and techniques for safely removing input fields: an open-source platform (Hive Console) that collects real production usage and a CI… | ||
| The Invisible Fortress: Embedding Zero-Trust Governance in the Supergraph | G. Singh, S. Shanawaz | 25m |
Claims a concrete pipeline: a six-step governance workflow (discovery, dictionary, classification, automation, continuous review, enforcement) that turns… | ||
| Caching Deep Dive: The Ultimate Way To Speed up Your GraphQL API | Uri Goldshtein | 37m |
Claims that decomposing queries into atomic cached fragments boosts cache hit rates and cuts latency: a demo shows a full-miss roundtrip at ~700 ms dropping to… | ||
| Scaling GraphQL on AWS: Production Architecture for High-Volume Data Systems | Aishwarya Tirumala | 20m |
Production GraphQL runs at >=1 billion ops/day across hundreds of clients using a self-hosted layer with AWS AppSync-compatible patterns, Lambda, DynamoDB and… | ||
| Understanding Your Graph, One Hash at a Time | Jens Neuse | 40m |
Tooling that turns federated entity keys into privacy-safe signals by hash entity keys and field/operation/header hashes, stores aggregates in ClickHouse… | ||
| Safely Merging Subgraphs in a Distributed World | Clarice Abreu, Rodrigo Jesus | 21m |
Brex describes a concrete, zero‑downtime workflow to consolidate dozens of tiny subgraphs into one modular domain using Apollo Federation and Apollo Router… | ||
| The 40,000-field Query: Optimizations for Gigantic High-QPS Operations | Gary Zeng | 09m |
Meta handles a 40,000-field persisted query by storing fragment-name-to-offset maps and implementing lazy fragment parsing so only needed fragments are parsed… | ||
| GraphQL: The Internal Agentic API | Christopher Chedeau | 16m |
Claims that agents can operate every employee workflow by writing GraphQL queries and running them against internal schemas, but many internal endpoints are… | ||
| The State of GraphQL Agent Skills | Dale Seo | 26m |
Agent Skills are a lightweight open format stored as a skill.md folder format that agents progressively load so ten or fifty skills don’t bloat context… | ||
| The Internal Lens: GraphQL Gateways From a Different Axis | Angel Svirkov | 27m |
A separate internal GraphQL gateway unifies 15 upstream sources into one admin client, built on GraphQL Mesh v0, accumulating 2,000 types, 120 queries, 100… | ||
| Lightning Talk: Schema Composition Without Federation | Matt Mahoney | 13m |
Meta runs hundreds of schema changes per day and replaces a federated supergraph with product-specific subset schemas that build independently using Buck and… | ||
| Lightning Talk: Making GraphQL Fun for the Backend Too | Stephen Haberman | 09m |
Homebound describes Joist as a GraphQL‑first TypeScript ORM that ships codegen, resolver scaffolding and deep dataloader integration to run on a 500+ table… | ||
| Bringing GraphQL Natively To Relational Databases With AI | Shashank Gugnani | 21m |
Oracle AI Database 26ai runs GraphQL natively via a new GraphQL table function that accepts standard GraphQL strings inside SQL, automatically infers joins… | ||
| Was It Worth It? Lessons from Implementing Two GraphQL Routers. In JavaScript & Rust | A. Tanrıkulu | 23m |
Built a production GraphQL gateway in JavaScript using GraphQL Yoga, Envelope, schema stitching, and GraphQL.js to move fast; later reimplemented the router in… | ||
| Simplifying MCP Tool Sprawl With GraphQL | Roy Derks | 21m |
Claims GraphQL can act as a single MCP layer to stop per-backend tool bloat and the team proves it by building an SDK that introspects GraphQL, exposes a… | ||
| Inverse Conway Maneuver, with GraphQL | Sam Deng | 22m |
Zillow builds a canonical customer and move schema on a federated GraphQL graph that keeps writable subgraphs owned by domains, uses identity/accounts as the… | ||
| Beyond HTTP 200: Observability With GraphQL | Kamil Kisiela | 26m |
HTTP 200 hides GraphQL failures and latency; observability requires logs, metrics and traces wired into federation. The Polar/Hygraph router emits a metric… | ||
| Keynote: Opening Remarks | Janette L. Cheng | 04m |
Opening remarks outline conference logistics and community commitments: Meta reaffirms sponsorship and support after last‑minute plan changes, notes GraphQL’s… | ||
| Sponsored Keynote: Federation Patterns We See in the Wild | Uri Goldshtein | 09m |
The Guild ships Hive Console as an open source MIT SaaS and reports companies self-hosting without paying, records its best year and has acquired Starlight and… | ||
| Keynote: GraphQL Foundation Update | Lee Byron | 11m |
GraphQL Foundation reports a recent spec release and ongoing work on incremental delivery, error management, and protocol composition while several working… | ||
| Keynote: GraphQL in the AI Era | Matt Debergalis | 14m |
Argues that GraphQL already underpins enterprise AI work at retailers, hospitality, and health care and must become the standard for the new context graph… | ||
| Keynote: Creating a Golden Path for GraphQL | Benjie Gillam, Kewei Qu | 10m |
GraphQL Foundation TSC launches the Golden Path Initiative to make safe defaults the path of least resistance: it proposes batch execution (breadth-first… | ||
| Keynote: Closing Remarks | Janette L. Cheng | 01m |
Thank you to all keynote speakers with a big ROUND OF APPLAUSE and a short schedule note that sessions start at 10:30. Attendees get a break now for about an… | ||
| Sponsored Session: Federation, Reversed: A Consumer-First Future with Fission | David Stutt | 16m |
Claims a new algorithm, Fission, that starts from a designed supergraph and fissures the supergraph into services, producing service schemas that are… | ||
| Service-to-service GraphQL: The New Sweet Spot! | Mark Larah | 20m |
Argues that GraphQL works well for service-to-service when you have multiple external and internal clients, federation with resolvers running inside services… | ||
| From Query to Conversation: GraphQL as an AI Interface Layer | Hugh Nguyen, Adam Conrad | 24m |
Meta builds an AI layer that discovers and loads subschemas on demand so LLMs can generate real GraphQL operations against thousands of types; it uses an… | ||
| How GraphQL Gives Coding Agents Eyes on What Actually Matters | Michael Staib | 27m |
Builds a clickable UI prototype, auto-extracts GraphQL fragments, and generates a schema diff plus a backend plan that the agent implements; the demo creates… | ||
| Lower Latency With Streaming GraphQL | Rob Richard | 32m |
Shows how using @defer and @stream cuts perceived latency by returning non‑deferred fields immediately and delivering deferred fragments or list items… | ||
| Scaling Real-Time: Building Federated Subscriptions in Rust | Denis Badurina | 28m |
Hive Router implements federated GraphQL subscriptions in Rust, supporting WebSockets, SSE, multipart HTTP and HTTP callbacks end-to-end; it uses synthetic… | ||
| Sponsored Session: Hands Off the Keyboard: An Introduction to Agentic Coding for GraphQL Developers | E. Bylund | 27m |
Argues that the fix for wrong AI code is not hand editing but improving prompts and codifying those lessons as markdown skills that capture specific schema… | ||
| The Case Against __typename | Sabrina Wasserman | 26m |
Claim: relying on __typename for client-side type checks breaks forward compatibility, bloats payloads, and fails on nested abstract types. Meta implements… | ||
| Shifting Instagram Development Towards Monolith Server Via Federated Schema | Xiao Han, Chi Chan, Deepak Singh, Kristina Kamendova, Anirudh Padmarao | 33m |
Instagram migrates its Python monolith to Facebook’s PHP monolith by building a unified SDL and a federated executor in each server that loads persisted query… | ||
| Incrementally Adopting GraphQL. The Holy Grail? | Robert Balicki | 26m |
Argues that incremental GraphQL adoption is practical by making frontends declarative and backends able to serve generated queries that fetch exactly the right… | ||
| Keynote: Closing Remarks | Lee Byron | 02m |
Encourages joining the community working group, which runs volunteer-run programs and operates the grant pipeline; funding comes through fund.graphql.org and… | ||
| Semantic Introspection | Pascal Senn | 34m |
Takes 15 public Singapore APIs, federates them into one GraphQL schema and adds two new introspection fields: underscore_search and underscore_definitions… | ||
| GraphQL Embeddings: AI-Powered Dynamic Operations From Schema To IDE | Michael Watson | 31m |
An open-source toolkit called GraphQL Workbench parses a GraphQL schema into chunked documents, embeds them with embedding Gemma 300, stores vectors in PG… | ||
| Turning San Francisco Into a GraphQL Server | Jean Lucas Lima | 11m |
Models San Francisco as a modular GraphQL runtime using Viaduct, composing zoning, building permits, transit and US Census data into tenant modules that… | ||
| DoS Wars: Revenge of the Fragments | Sachin Shinde | 13m |
Fragments can hide exponential work behind linear execution: validation often visits named fragments once while some validators and planners do not, producing… | ||
| Screens on Shuffle: How Netflix Scales Server‑Driven, Ever‑Changing Pages | Sreekanth Ramakrishnan | 33m |
Netflix evolves GraphQL into a coarse‑grained server‑driven UI where servers assemble UI from pages → sections → entities and attach decoupled section and… | ||
| The Biggest Change To GraphQL Codegen in 10 Years | Eddy Nguyen, Igor Kusakov | 30m |
GraphQL Codegen ships a client-focused redesign: client plugins V6 that generate only types actually used by each operation, cutting unused output dramatically… | ||
| Grafast: A Declarative Solution To GraphQL's Execution Woes | Benjie Gillam | 25m |
Grafast replaces depth-first per-field resolvers with declarative planning that builds a request-wide execution plan, then executes breadth-first to batch and… | ||
| Sharding a GraphQL Gateway for Blast Radius Reduction | Linquan Zhang, Cetin Sahin | 28m |
Airbnb’s Viaduct runs a single-JVM GraphQL gateway for ~600 tenants and >70% of API traffic where one bad query can crash the fleet in 10–15 seconds. They… | ||
| GraphQL Data Mocking at Scale With LLMs and @generateMock | Michael Rebello | 26m |
Airbnb integrates an LLM into the Naobi CLI to generate type-safe GraphQL mocks via an @generateMock directive and serve them at runtime with @respondWithMock… | ||
| Changing the Game for Trusted Documents — What If Your Whole Platform Natively Supported It? | L. Quast, D. Badurina | 25m |
Platform demonstrates a concrete workflow: GraphQL Codegen creates a manifest mapping operation hashes to documents, those manifests publish to Hive console… | ||
| When GraphQL Gets Expensive: Performance & Cost Patterns in Production Serverless Architectures | H. Siddhu, S.G. Venkatesh | 26m |
GraphQL queries that naively resolve nested fields trigger 701 DB calls in the example schema, producing a P99 of 6.4s and dozens of timeouts; at scale that… | ||
| Modern Apollo Client React | Brennen Davis | 24m |
Built a production React app with Apollo Client v4 and TanStack Router, using GraphQL codegen (Guild) to enforce fragment co‑location. Router-level preloading… | ||
| How GraphQL Helped Create Scalability and Stability in the Retirement Space. | Cameron Sechrist | 23m |
Stacks replaces heavy REST fan-outs with a GraphQL gateway as a composition layer, using federation-style stitching, resolver batching (DataLoader patterns)… | ||
| Stop Reviewing Schemas: How Intuit Made Developers Faster by Automating Governance | Oleks Bidiuk | 32m |
Intuit replaces manual reviews with a hybrid governance system that runs real-time IDE linting plus AI-powered schema analysis and semantic collision detection… | ||
| Observability for a Multi-Tenant GraphQL Gateway at Scale | Vickey Yeh | 20m |
Viaduct runs as one JVM serving ~70% of Airbnb traffic with ~1.5M lines of code, ~600 tenant modules (≈200 teams) and ~200 merges/day, so ownership and metrics… | ||
| Building MCP Apps With GraphQL Patterns You Already Know | Jerel Miller | 29m |
Claims that common GraphQL client patterns map directly to MCP apps and then shows it: uses Apollo’s AI apps client plus Apollo MCP server, a tool call link… | ||
| Speed Without Sacrifice: How Wayfair Transforms DevEx With AI and MCP | M. Karlapudi, M. Sethi | 28m |
Wayfair embeds AI across the GraphQL lifecycle to cut review and testing friction: GraphQL Schema Copilot uses RAG with embeddings over 12 MB of internal docs… | ||
| @live GraphQL in Practice: Postgres-to-React Realtime Data Sync | Tobbe Lundberg | 26m |
A Postgres-to-React realtime pipeline is built end-to-end: ESP32 devices send MQTT to a Node broker, messages persist in Postgres, Postgres triggers use… | ||
| GraphQL All Hands Meeting | Jory Buren | 01h 04m |
Foundation explains it holds GraphQL IP and the spec, runs working groups and a modest grants budget, and reports concrete community work: a revived docs site… | ||
| GraphQLShield: CWE-Aware Defense in Depth for GraphQL APIs in Go- | Ravi Sastry Kadali | 16m |
An open-source Go middleware called GraphQLShield enforces three concrete defenses: static schema checks that flag cyclic types, missing depth limits and… | ||
| Lightning Talk: The @deprecated Journey: Five Stops From Schema Hint To Gateway Power | N. Abouelazm | 09m |
Shows a concrete path that turns @deprecated into governance and runtime tooling: add replacedBy/migrationURL and sunset date args, run a schema transformer… | ||
| Panel Discussion: The GraphQL Production Roundtable | Aileen Chen, Clarice Abreu, Stephen Spalding, Jory Burson | 28m |
Large orgs describe concrete defenses: an operation registry with trusted documents, adaptive concurrency using a Netflix library, and traffic sharding after a… | ||
| Coordinated Access Control with @policy | Huang Minghe | 20m |
Booking.com turns multi‑team access disputes into a schema contract using the @policy directive, with domain teams authoring rules, Legal/Privacy and Identity… | ||
| A GraphQL-inspired Orchestration Language for the AI Era | Martijn Walraven | 31m |
A GraphQL-like language prototype keeps GraphQL’s typing and field selection but adds an extended selection set with expressions and reshaping, explicit entity… | ||
| The Easy Way and the Hard Way: Blue-green GraphQL Deployments | Zack Warnimont | 26m |
Describes a blue‑green GraphQL deployment that stores each composed supergraph as an OCI image layer so routers pin digests and shift traffic by moving tags… | ||
| The State of GraphQL Federation | Michael Staib | 20m |
GraphQL Federation becomes a vendor-neutral Composite Schema standard that adds concrete primitives: a new variable batching protocol for batching multiple… | ||
| Brute Force Correctness | James Bellenger | 24m |
Describes applying generative differential testing to GraphQL: a schema/query generator (built with Kotest Property examples) runs millions of fuzzed objects… | ||
| Lightning Talk: Search and Execute with Code Mode Backed by the... | J. Neuse, A. Soormally | 21m |
WunderGraph shows a working "code mode" that indexes GraphQL schemas and turns natural language into executable queries: a prompt-to-query pipeline (Yoko/Yuko)… | ||
| Keynote: GraphQL’s Next Chapter: Progress, Proposals, and Participation | Pascal Senn, Mark Larah | 16m |
Community working groups produce concrete outputs: a nearly finished MIT‑licensed composite schema spec with a reference test suite and multiple vendor… | ||
| GraphQL Meets LLMs & Agents: Building Production AI at Starbucks Scale | Sharon Gorla | 27m |
Starbucks describes using GraphQL at 180M+ queries/day across 10,000 stores and 31M+ app users as the substrate for AI agents, claiming 75x token cost… | ||
| nothing matches | ||