GraphQLConf 2025: Full Schedule

Monday, 8 September - Wednesday, 10 September, 2025
In-Person Only | Amsterdam, Netherlands

The Sched app allows you to build your schedule but is not a substitute for your event registration. You must be registered for GraphQLConf 2025 to participate in the sessions.

Please see the GraphQLConf 2025 website for additional information about the conference.

Please note: This schedule is automatically displayed in Central European Summer Time (UTC+2). To see the schedule in your preferred timezone, please select from the drop-down located at the bottom of the menu to the right.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Timing of sessions and room locations are subject to change.

09:30 BST

Keynote: GraphQL at Meta - Jordan Eldredge, Meta

Monday September 8, 2025 09:30 - 09:40 BST

Grote Zaal

A peek behind the curtain revealing how GraphQL is used at Meta. We will explore how everything from culture, development process, client and server implementations, schema patterns and conventions, advanced tooling and more work together to allow GraphQL to enable great user and developer experiences at Meta.

Speakers

Jordan Eldredge

Software Engineer at Meta, Meta

Jordan has spent the last eight years working at Meta. He currently works on Relay, a sophisticated GraphQL client for JavaScript that powers most of Meta's JavaScript applications.

Monday September 8, 2025 09:30 - 09:40 BST
Grote Zaal

Keynote Sessions

Audience Level Intermediate

11:25 BST

Performant GraphQL at Scale - Andreas Marek, Atlassian

Monday September 8, 2025 11:25 - 11:55 BST

Studio

After maintaining GraphQL Java for 10 years we learned what aspects of GraphQL are critical for optimal performance.

We we look at what users of GraphQL should consider and which aspects of the spec are critical for optimal performance.

We will look also closer into the aspects of operating GraphQL at scale including and what it means when the schema and requests continue to grow.

Speakers

Andreas Marek

Developer, Atlassian

GraphQL TSC Member and GraphQL Java founder. Working on all things GraphQL at Atlassian.

Monday September 8, 2025 11:25 - 11:55 BST
Studio

GraphQL in Production - Scaling

Audience Level Intermediate

12:25 BST

See the Graph in GraphQL: Graph Visualization in Action - Ivan Goncharov, ApolloGraphQL

Monday September 8, 2025 12:25 - 12:35 BST

Grote Zaal

Despite having "Graph" in its name, GraphQL schemas are rarely visualized as actual graphs.

This lightning talk explores the untapped potential of graph visualization for GraphQL schemas based on lessons learned while working on graphql-voyager.

We'll explore the theory behind effective schema visualization, share key insights from my 9 years of experience in this field, and discuss current challenges in representing complex schemas.

I'll also present experimental approaches that go beyond existing libraries, pushing the boundaries of how we understand and interact with GraphQL schemas.

Join me for a visual journey that reveals what makes the "Graph" in GraphQL truly powerful, potentially reshaping how we design and understand our APIs.

Speakers

Ivan Goncharov

Staff Software Engineer, ApolloGraphQL

Ivan has been active in the GraphQL community since its early days and is currently a member of the GraphQL Technical Steering Committee.

Monday September 8, 2025 12:25 - 12:35 BST
Grote Zaal

Developer Experience - Documentation

Audience Level Intermediate

13:45 BST

GraphQL Subscriptions Are Stateful; We Made Them Stateless - Matteo Collina, Platformatic

Monday September 8, 2025 13:45 - 14:15 BST

Grote Zaal

GraphQL Subscriptions over WebSockets is an extremely popular way to notify the caller that something happened on the back end. While a high level of Quality of Service is possible in other protocols such as STOMP or MQTT, there is no actual guarantee of delivery with GraphQL Subscriptions: any acknowledgment mechanism should be built in userland.

WebSockets can be interrupted at any time with both graceful and ungraceful disconnections, and the lack of acknowledgment in the subscription protocol affects reliability, making GraphQL Subscription over WebSocket connections susceptible to disconnections, as any protocol failures will result in messages being lost. In other words, Subscriptions are stateful. In this talk, we will investigate a mitigation technique to make them resumable so that the connection can be destroyed and recreated without any message loss.

Speakers

Matteo Collina

Co-Founder & CTO, Platformatic

Matteo co-founded Platformatic.dev and serves as its CTO, recognized as a leading Open Source author in JavaScript with 30B annual downloads. Previously, he was Chief Software Architect at NearForm and earned a Ph.D. in 2014. Matteo is on the Node.js Technical Steering Committee... Read More →

Monday September 8, 2025 13:45 - 14:15 BST
Grote Zaal

GraphQL in Production - Federation and distributed systems

Audience Level Intermediate

14:25 BST

Composing Your UI With GraphQL: Building Federated Component Systems That Scale - Gabriel Cura-Castro, StubHub Inc

Monday September 8, 2025 14:25 - 14:55 BST

IJzaal

GraphQL federation has changed how we think about data and it's time to adopt that thinking to how we build UIs and component systems. In this talk, Gabe will share his deep experience from building design systems at Apple, Netflix and now StubHub to help you design yours.

What are the advantages GraphQL brings to a traditional React component system? How can fragments optimize the composability of your components? How to reduce duplication while reducing the time you need to ship new features?

We will provide guidance on how to build and leverage a federated component system along-side your design system.

Finally, we will cover how we've leveraged AI to speedup the creation of our design system and federated components at StuHub. Join to learn more!

Speakers

Gabriel Cura-Castro

Senior Software Engineer - Design System Lead, StubHub Inc

Gabriel Cura-Castro is senior software engineer with a particular interest in UX and design systems. He has two decades of experience developing software in a diverse range of fields spanning from developer tools, internet infrastructure, and finance. He has spent the last decade... Read More →

Monday September 8, 2025 14:25 - 14:55 BST
IJzaal

Developer Experience - Frontend

Audience Level Intermediate

14:25 BST

Unlocking Federation Security at Scale in Booking.com - Sanver Tarmur & Minghe Huang, Booking.com

Monday September 8, 2025 14:25 - 14:55 BST

Studio

In Booking.com we are heavily using Federated GraphQL approach, more than 150 backend sub-graph services are integrated from different domains of the company such as accommodations, partner, flights, cars, trips, and fintech.

Our federated GraphQL layer hosts daily 11b+ incoming requests, Federation in the back distributes 14b+ requests to the sub-graphs per day. We have a diverse set of clients such as Booking traveller, partner native apps/web clients, 140+ SSR (Server Side Rendering) services for Web/Mobile rendering, and AI chatbots. This level of adoption brings unique challenges in terms of security and traffic management. In Booking.com we have a large attack surface since our GraphQL schema is huge, to be specific we have ~7k types with 27k+ fields. In this session, we will share our schema driven approaches to mitigate risks due to authN/Z leaks, DDoS attacks or exposure of sensitive PII/PCI data. These methodologies are designed with a high degree of generality, ensuring their applicability and scalability across every other Federated GraphQL system.

Speakers

Minghe Huang

Senior Software Engineer, Booking.com

Minghe is a passionate software engineer with over a decade of experience spanning various technologies. With a deep interest in coding and scalable architectures, Minghe is currently focused on GraphQL federation and maintains the GraphQL federation platform at Booking.com.

Sanver Tarmur

Senior Software Engineer 2, Booking.com

Sanver is a Senior Software Engineer II at Booking.com with 15 years of industry experience. In recent years, he has been leading the Federated GraphQL transformation at Booking.com, focusing on scaling, enhancing the security of the GraphQL platform, and improving the developer experience... Read More →

Monday September 8, 2025 14:25 - 14:55 BST
Studio

GraphQL in Production - Security

Audience Level Intermediate

15:05 BST

Event Sourcing + GraphQL = ♥️ - Mike Astle, Xolvio

Monday September 8, 2025 15:05 - 15:35 BST

IJzaal

Event Sourcing is emerging as a preferred approach to building complex software systems. It enables rapid development, smooth evolution over time, and opens the door to AI-based acceleration.

We will make a brief introduction to the core concepts of Event Sourcing and why the approach is loved by its adherents. We will review the foundational elements of an Event Sourced application including some common architectural choices.

GraphQL is known for expressive queries, precise data fetching, real-time capabilities, and a strong ecosystem. All of these pair well with Event Sourced applications. GraphQL simplifies the complexity of querying event streams, enables precise control over client-server interactions, and supports flexible schema evolution that is crucial to long term success. We will discuss this in the context of established patterns (and anti-patterns!).

By the end of this talk, attendees will clearly understand how combining Event Sourcing and GraphQL accelerates development and prepares data-driven apps to take advantage of AI-driven acceleration in the near future.

Speakers

Mike Astle

CTO, Xolvio

Mike is a practical software leader with an interest in theory, but a stronger interest in getting things done. He's been slinging ones and zeroes for 30 years now and has experience going from five person startups to thousand person enterprises. Mike is currently the CTO of Xolvio... Read More →

Monday September 8, 2025 15:05 - 15:35 BST
IJzaal

Developer Experience - Patterns and community trends

Audience Level Intermediate

15:05 BST

GraphQL Performance Issues at Netflix Scale - Stephen Chambers & Tejas Shikhare, Netflix

Monday September 8, 2025 15:05 - 15:35 BST

Grote Zaal

The Member Experience Core Systems team at Netflix is entrusted with orchestrating every facet of the member experience. From the intricacies of the profiles screen to the dynamic homepage and the seamless search for your favorite shows, our robust API layer is the backbone that supports it all.

Operating at an astronomical scale, our two principal Subgraph Services collectively manage over a million GraphQL queries per second. This immense scale, coupled with the diverse queries our systems accommodate, ensures that even the most minute edge cases are brought to light.

In this presentation, we will delve into two significant production bugs that emerged at scale. The first involved a federation-based solution at the query planning layer, which culminated in a 20% reduction in requests per second and yielded substantial cost savings amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars. The second, a subgraph service specific enhancement, remarkably doubled the efficiency of our entire fleet.

By sharing our journey of identifying and resolving these issues, we aspire to provide insights that will directly enhance your day-to-day endeavors using GraphQL.

Speakers

Stephen Chambers

N/A, Netflix

Stephen Chambers is a Senior Software Engineer on the API team at Netflix. With a background in distributed systems, he spent six years at Liberty Mutual Insurance and two years at Apple before joining Netflix. Brand new to GraphQL, Stephen is navigating this technology with fresh... Read More →

Tejas Shikhare

Netflix

Monday September 8, 2025 15:05 - 15:35 BST
Grote Zaal

GraphQL in Production - Federation and distributed systems

Audience Level Intermediate

15:05 BST

Breaking and Building Boundaries: Securing Federated GraphQL - Yehuda Rosenberg, JFrog

Monday September 8, 2025 15:05 - 15:35 BST

Studio

You added security measures to all your subgraphs and are sure you're safe? Think again. In a federated GraphQL system, the most significant risks often hide not within individual services, but within the logic and trust assumptions of the federation layer itself.

This talk explores how federated GraphQL architectures introduce a new class of security challenges that traditional testing and validation frequently overlook. We'll walk through practical examples based on real-world use cases and both offensive and defensive insights, showing why stitching secure services together doesn’t automatically result in a secure supergraph.

Attendees will see federation-specific threats in action, learn important security concepts, and walk away with actionable strategies for hardening routers, auditing configurations, and building safer service interactions. We'll also share PoC code and conceptual outlines for detection tooling to help apply these learnings in real-world systems.

An engaging, practical, and scenario-driven session - especially relevant for developers and security engineers working with federated GraphQL systems.

Speakers

Yehuda Rosenberg

Application Security Researcher, JFrog, JFrog

I'm an Application Security Researcher passionate about breaking assumptions in modern web technologies. From protocol quirks to real-world vulnerabilities, I explore how small oversights lead to big security issues. My work often blends offensive research with practical defense... Read More →

Monday September 8, 2025 15:05 - 15:35 BST
Studio

GraphQL in Production - Security

Audience Level Intermediate

15:55 BST

The Federated GraphQL Subscriptions Zoo - Tom Houlé, Grafbase

Monday September 8, 2025 15:55 - 16:05 BST

IJzaal

Subscriptions are not like queries and mutations. They require specific thinking and care in any implementation strategy.
Federation adds a layer of infrastructure that can complicate subscriptions in two ways:

- scaling, because the federation gateway may have to resolve many subscription streams at the same time,
- translation, because each subgraph has the protocols it supports, and they may not overlap with the protocol used by the clients.

This lightning talk dives into the challenges of translation we encountered in concrete scenarios:

- How websocket init payloads map, or not, to http headers
- How to translate SSE requests to websocket requests
- Alternatives like multipart streams
- Websocket subprotocols

Speakers

Tom Houlé

Engineer, Grafbase

Tom's professional life has gravitated towards GraphQL and Rust, schemas and databases. After authoring the first Rust GraphQL client library, recent years have taken him from the database schema management space at Prisma to GraphQL federation at Grafbase. In his free time, he enjoys... Read More →

Monday September 8, 2025 15:55 - 16:05 BST
IJzaal

GraphQL in Production - Federation and distributed systems

Audience Level Intermediate

16:15 BST

Authorization in Federated GraphQL - Tom Houlé, Grafbase

Monday September 8, 2025 16:15 - 16:25 BST

IJzaal

Adopting GraphQL federation creates a convenient place in your infrastructure to make authorization decisions:

- It comes early in the request lifecycle, before any subgraph.
- It has access to the whole client request, as well as the entirety of the federated graph.
- Authorization can still be the responsibility of the subgraph teams, or a cross cutting concern.

This talk is about leveraging the special position of the federation gateway for authorization.

We'll cover the directives federation offers for authorization out of the box: `@authenticated`, `@requiresScopes`, `@policy`. To cover a more advanced use case, we'll explore how to implement fine-grained authorization taking advantage of data from your federated graph by leveraging extensions in the open source Grafbase Gateway.

Speakers

Tom Houlé

Engineer, Grafbase

Monday September 8, 2025 16:15 - 16:25 BST
IJzaal

GraphQL in Production - Federation and distributed systems

Audience Level Intermediate

16:35 BST

Compose Your Mobile App With GraphQL - Martin Bonnin, Apollo

Monday September 8, 2025 16:35 - 17:05 BST

Studio

Jetpack Compose is a declarative UI framework for Kotlin and Android. Jetpack Compose makes it easy to describe your UI graph and build composable UIs.

On the other hand, GraphQL is a declarative language for your Data. GraphQL makes it easy to describe and query your Data Graph.

Sounds like a perfect match!

In this presentation, we'll take a look at the current mobile architectures and how they differ from web architectures.

We will dive into cache, offline mode and error handling and investigate how GraphQL can help mobile developers build more reactive and robust UIs.

Using real life examples from the GraphQL conf 2025 app, we well discuss patterns such as colocated fragments, optimistic updates, subscriptions and see how they fit in the mobile app development cycle.

While it will use some Kotlin, most of the examples can be applied to iOS and/or any other mobile platform.

If you're a web developer, I'm hoping to give you some talking point to start the discussion with your mobile teams. Let's unite frontend developers!

Speakers

Martin Bonnin

Mobile Engineer, Apollo

Martin is a maintainer of Apollo Kotlin. He has been writing Android applications since Cupcake and fell in love with Kotlin in 2017. Martin loves naming things and the sound of his laptop fan compiling all these type-safe programs. When not busy rewriting all his bash scripts in... Read More →

Monday September 8, 2025 16:35 - 17:05 BST
Studio

Developer Experience - Frontend

Audience Level Intermediate

16:35 BST

Death, Taxes, and Deprecation - Stephen Spalding, Netflix

Monday September 8, 2025 16:35 - 17:05 BST

Grote Zaal

alt title: Surviving Change Without Breaking Everything

When we launched our new GraphQL API at Netflix, it felt perfect—destined to power hundreds of millions of devices. Yet, change is inevitable. Even if your schema seems flawless today (which it isn't), requirements will shift, new features will emerge, and regrets will follow.

GraphQL promises evolvability, allowing us to move forward without multiple API versions. But how does this hold up in practice? We mark fields as @deprecated, but what happens next? How can we embrace experimentation without entombing technical debt in the API? Does federation complicate things? Evolving your schema without breaking clients is easy, right? Right??

Drawing from experience with the Netflix API, this talk explores techniques for evolving your schema safely and painlessly. We'll cover the schema lifecycle—from experimentation to design, deprecation, and deletion.

Attendees will leave with:
- Schema design principles that facilitate change
- Practical techniques for evolving GraphQL schemas
- Strategies for managing a deprecation workflow

Join us as we learn to face the inevitability of change with confidence and serenity.

Speakers

Stephen Spalding

Engineer, Netflix

Stephen is a member of the Edge API team at Netflix and a GraphQL TSC emeritus. His team develops and operates the Netflix API platform. This is the nexus point where hundreds of microservices are aggregated into a single API that delivers the Netflix experience for the hundreds of... Read More →

Monday September 8, 2025 16:35 - 17:05 BST
Grote Zaal

GraphQL in Production - Schema evolution

Audience Level Intermediate

17:15 BST

Building a Kotlin Federated GraphQL Gateway and Executor - Samuel Bernardo Vázquez Andalón, Expedia Group

Monday September 8, 2025 17:15 - 17:45 BST

IJzaal

In this talk, we'll explore the design and implementation of a distributed GraphQL router built with Kotlin, leveraging graphql-java and Spring Boot.
By using Kotlin’s powerful scripting and DSLs, we can create a highly configurable and scalable solution that simplifies the complexity of managing distributed GraphQL APIs.

Speakers

Samuel Bernardo Vázquez Andalón

Principal Software Engineer, Expedia Group

Born and raised in Guadalajara, Jalisco, México, attended University of Guadalajara and working for Expedia Group since 2018.

Monday September 8, 2025 17:15 - 17:45 BST
IJzaal

GraphQL in Production - Federation and distributed systems

Audience Level Intermediate

17:15 BST

The Big Ideas in Relay - Jordan Eldredge, Meta

Monday September 8, 2025 17:15 - 17:45 BST

Grote Zaal

Relay, Meta’s advanced GraphQL client for React, has many innovative capabilities not available in other clients. We will explore these capabilities, what they are, how they work, and the fundamental problems they solve:

- Ensure data consistency with a normalized cache
- Bound memory usage with user-land garbage collection
- Avoid append-only queries by statically detecting unused fields
- Bound JavaScript bundle size with Data Driven Dependencies
- Build snappy, robust, mutations with rebasing optimistic updates
- Preload code and data for any surface in just one network roundtrip with Entrypoints
- Enable optimal data fetching without sacrificing local reasoning with Relay’s compiler

And more!

Speakers

Jordan Eldredge

Software Engineer at Meta, Meta

Jordan has spent the last eight years working at Meta. He currently works on Relay, a sophisticated GraphQL client for JavaScript that powers most of Meta's JavaScript applications.

Monday September 8, 2025 17:15 - 17:45 BST
Grote Zaal

GraphQL in Production - Scaling

Audience Level Intermediate

11:00 BST

Namespacing Is the Next Frontier of GraphQL Federation - Martijn Walraven, Apollo

Tuesday September 9, 2025 11:00 - 11:40 BST

Studio

Although the topic of namespacing has been brought up repeatedly in the GraphQL community over the last decade, there is an understandable worry that it would lead to anti-patterns in schema design. If namespacing is used as an excuse to avoid coordination between teams, this can result in a fragmented GraphQL schema that reflects current team boundaries as opposed to domain or client concerns.

GraphQL Federation offers an alternative architecture: when coordination is enforced and consistency guaranteed, a large number of teams can contribute to a single, coherent GraphQL schema without the danger of stepping on each other's toes.

Even with that architecture in place however, I believe there are still legitimate use cases for namespacing. In this talk, I will go over some of those use cases, and formulate a set of design principles that could guide the introduction of namespacing in GraphQL.

Speakers

Martijn Walraven

Software Engineer, Apollo

Martijn Walraven lives in Amsterdam and has been with Apollo since the early days of our GraphQL journey. He is one of the co-creators of Apollo Federation. Outside of work, he enjoys volunteering at a primary school and is working towards a degree in education.

Tuesday September 9, 2025 11:00 - 11:40 BST
Studio

GraphQL Working Group - Federation specification

Audience Level Intermediate

11:50 BST

The State of GraphQL Federation - Michael Staib, ChilliCream & Martijn Walraven, Apollo

Tuesday September 9, 2025 11:50 - 12:30 BST

Studio

The GraphQL community has come together to standardize how people can build distributed systems with GraphQL as an orchestrator. In this talk I will explain the general idea that we have for GraphQL as an Orchestrator in this space and how the new specification is tackling this. We will look at the progress we have made since last GraphQL Conf in the GraphQL composite schema working group and also get some sneak peaks at our early RFCs and prototypes. I will outline how this new specification is taking the best ideas of existing solutions in the market to make the next big leap towards mainstream adoption. This will allow anyone to build tooling by implementing the spec or parts of the spec that seamlessly integrate with other vendors.

Speakers

Michael Staib

Michael Staib, ChilliCream

Michael is a member of the GraphQL technical steering committee, a Microsoft MVP, and the author of the Hot Chocolate project (https://github.com/ChilliCream/hotchocolate), a platform for building GraphQL servers and clients in .NET. This open-source project has been his main focus... Read More →

Martijn Walraven

Software Engineer, Apollo

Tuesday September 9, 2025 11:50 - 12:30 BST
Studio

GraphQL Working Group - Federation specification

Audience Level Intermediate

14:00 BST

Lower Latency With Streaming GraphQL - Rob Richard, 1stDibs

Tuesday September 9, 2025 14:00 - 14:40 BST

Studio

Learn how to lower latency in your applications by streaming your GraphQL responses using the @defer and @stream directives. Learn the trade-offs of when to use these new directives and how they differ from GraphQL Subscriptions.

@defer and @stream have been in development for some time now and have gone through many iterations. Learn about the motivation behind these changes and how they will lead to scalable GraphQL servers and efficient clients.

Speakers

Rob Richard

Senior Director, Front-End Engineering, 1stDibs

Rob is a front-end engineer at 1stDibs, an online marketplace for extraordinary design. He is also a member of the GraphQL Technical Steering committee, where he has been championing the @defer & @stream spec proposal.

Tuesday September 9, 2025 14:00 - 14:40 BST
Studio

GraphQL Working Group - GraphQL specification

Audience Level Intermediate

14:50 BST

The State of GraphQL Open Telemetry - Pascal Senn, ChilliCream

Tuesday September 9, 2025 14:50 - 15:30 BST

Studio

Curious about how observability is evolving in the GraphQL ecosystem? This session explores the current state of OpenTelemetry and its integration with GraphQL. We'll cover the fundamentals of OpenTelemetry, introduce the OpenTelemetry working group (https://github.com/graphql/otel-wg), and dive into tracing, logging, and metrics - all essential pillars of observability. You'll also learn how OpenTelemetry is being applied in distributed GraphQL architectures to improve performance monitoring and troubleshooting across services. Whether you're new to observability or looking to level up your GraphQL stack, this talk will bring you up to speed on where the community is heading.

Speakers

Pascal Senn

COO, ChilliCream

I'm co-founder of ChilliCream, where we're passionate about advancing the GraphQL ecosystem. We develop and maintain open-source software, actively help and participate in the community, and create tools that help developers to get the most out of their GraphQL APIs.

Tuesday September 9, 2025 14:50 - 15:30 BST
Studio

GraphQL Working Group - Reference software

Audience Level Intermediate

09:00 BST

Next-Generation GraphQL Cache Management in Your Android and iOS Apps - Benoit Lubek, Apollo Graph & Zach FettersMoore, Apollo GraphQL

Wednesday September 10, 2025 09:00 - 09:10 BST

IJzaal

Effective caching is essential for building fast, resilient mobile apps especially when aiming for offline-first experiences. Apollo Kotlin and Apollo iOS offer a powerful Normalized Cache component tailored to GraphQL. In this lightning talk, we’ll showcase the latest advancements in both libraries, including support for pagination, cache expiration, and other new features designed to simplify and supercharge cache management on mobile.

Speakers

Zach FettersMoore

Staff Software Engineer, Apollo GraphQL

Engineer at Apollo GraphQL, working on the Apollo iOS Library

Benoit Lubek

Android Developer, Apollo Graph

Currently working on Apollo-Kotlin, the Kotlin SDK for GraphQL, Benoit has been writing software for 20 years, with a focus on Android since its v1. When he’s not coding, you can find him enjoying movies or geocaching.

Wednesday September 10, 2025 09:00 - 09:10 BST
IJzaal

Developer Experience - Frontend

Audience Level Intermediate

09:20 BST

What If GraphQL Knew Accessibility? - Vanessa Johnson, The New York Times

Wednesday September 10, 2025 09:20 - 09:30 BST

IJzaal

What if your GraphQL schema could do more than provide data? What if it could help your app be more accessible from the start? In this lightning talk, we'll explore an innovative idea of embedding accessibility metadata directly into GraphQL schemas. Inspired by using Kotlin semantics in Jetpack Compose, imagine annotating fields with labels, roles, or screen reader hints that can be used to support screen readers, improve navigation, and even power automated accessibility testing. By adding custom accessibility annotations, tools could generate more accessible UI components, which enhances both the developer experience and the user experience. This is a call to rethink the developer experience and treat accessibility as a first-class concern. Let's reimagine GraphQL not just as a data layer, but as an inclusive design enabler.

Speakers

Vanessa Johnson

Android Engineer, The New York Times

Vanessa Johnson is an Android Engineer at The New York Times working on the Games Android app. She loves building mobile apps and any technical topics she finds interesting. She is passionate about accessibility, is working on various side projects, and has a newsletter & a podcast... Read More →

Wednesday September 10, 2025 09:20 - 09:30 BST
IJzaal

Developer Experience - Patterns and community trends

Audience Level Intermediate

10:20 BST

Not Your Regular Rate Limiting #GraphQL - Meenakshi Dhanani, Postman

Wednesday September 10, 2025 10:20 - 10:30 BST

Grote Zaal

Rate limiting in GraphQL APIs goes beyond the traditional approaches used in REST APIs. Regular techniques fall short when handling complex queries and preventing abuse. In this lightning talk, we will explore creative strategies for overcoming these challenges within the unique context of GraphQL's single endpoint architecture. We will also discuss practical techniques and dive into real-world examples that demonstrate how to optimize rate limiting in your GraphQL APIs and ensure the scalability and security of your applications.

Speakers

Meenakshi Dhanani

Ms., Postman

Meenakshi is a Technical Enablement Architect at Postman, helping internal teams and customers build better API practices and unlock the platform's full potential, which serves over 30 million users worldwide. With a background in full-stack development and Developer Relations, she... Read More →

Wednesday September 10, 2025 10:20 - 10:30 BST
Grote Zaal

GraphQL in Production - Scaling

Audience Level Intermediate

10:20 BST

From Data Loaders To Batch Resolvers - Aileen Chen, Airbnb

Wednesday September 10, 2025 10:20 - 10:50 BST

IJzaal

In theory, data loaders solve most "N+1" problems in GraphQL. In practice, they can be hard to implement, so they’re typically used only in performance-critical situations and often reactively, once inefficiencies surface. To achieve better performance, batching needs to be applied wherever possible.

This talk introduces batch resolvers, a more developer-friendly alternative to data loaders. While traditional GraphQL resolvers take a single input and produce a single output, batching resolvers take a list of inputs and return a list of outputs. A batch resolver can simply call a batch service API without worrying about data loaders.

When a developer provides a batch resolver, our GraphQL server automatically aggregates individual data fetches into a single call to that resolver. It can also apply heuristics to improve aggregation, for example by consolidating different selection sets for the same entity into a single input. This design not only makes application developers’ lives easier, but also allows the server to better optimize query execution by coordinating batch dispatching as part of a broader execution strategy.

Speakers

Aileen Chen

Staff Software Engineer, Airbnb

I work on Viaduct, Airbnb's GraphQL-based data-oriented service mesh.

Wednesday September 10, 2025 10:20 - 10:50 BST
IJzaal

Developer Experience - Backend

Audience Level Intermediate

11:15 BST

Deep Dive Into a GraphQL Federation Gateway, From Query Planning To the Execution - Benjamin Rabier, Grafbase

Wednesday September 10, 2025 11:15 - 11:45 BST

Studio

Traditional GraphQL servers execute queries field by field with a depth-first algorithm as defined in the GraphQL specification. In contrast, GraphQL federation gateways need to partition the query and retrieve chunks of data from external data sources, creating new challenges. We'll present how we solved those challenges with a focus on performance.

The first, query planning, is to find the best possible plan with the multiple possibilities federation offers to unify your data and the various data sources with their requirements. We express this problem as a graph of possibilities and solve it as a Steiner Tree problem. The second challenge is performant execution. As we need to read and write overlapping chunks of the response in parallel, it's hard to be as efficient as a traditional GraphQL server writing a response iteratively with independent fields. We build an execution DAG with field dependencies, parallelizing work as much as possible without any lock on the response. We also pre-compute the expected data shape to ingest and validate incoming data into the response without any intermediate memory allocation.

Speakers

Benjamin Rabier

Software Engineer, Grafbase

Living close to Paris, I've been at Grafbase for over two years building the GraphQL federation gateway among other things.

Wednesday September 10, 2025 11:15 - 11:45 BST
Studio

GraphQL in Production - Federation and distributed systems

Audience Level Intermediate

11:15 BST

Safely Roll Out Strict Error Handling in Your GraphQL Codebase - Itamar Kestenbaum, Meta

Wednesday September 10, 2025 11:15 - 11:45 BST

IJzaal

Last year we introduced strict error handling - with @throwOnFieldError as an example of how this can be accomplished. This year, we’ll discuss how to safely roll it out.

You’ve had a GraphQL codebase that weakly handled server-side errors for years. Now, you have the tools (directives, hooks, handlers, and language features) that let you treat field errors properly. However, it’s a daunting task to suddenly explode queries en-masse by flipping a switch. This move is powerful, but requires a thoughtful and data-driven approach to do safely.

In this talk we’ll cover:
* Preparing the groundwork for migration to stricter error handling
* Using data to make informed decisions about fragment/query behavior
* Gating your change at a singular point
* Scaling the rollout to a large codebase
* How we’re approaching this rollout at Meta

Speakers

Itamar Kestenbaum

Software Engineer, Meta

Software Engineer working on Infrastructure experiences at Meta

Wednesday September 10, 2025 11:15 - 11:45 BST
IJzaal

GraphQL in Production - Scaling

Audience Level Intermediate

13:45 BST

LinkedIn's Code-First Approach To Federated GraphQL With gRPC - Ethan Shen, LinkedIn

Wednesday September 10, 2025 13:45 - 14:15 BST

Studio

Imagine having a federated GraphQL query builder customized to meet unique software infrastructure requirements—have you ever dreamed of such a tool? If so, please join us for an exciting session where we uncover LinkedIn’s code first approach to querying entity-oriented data with federated GraphQL on top of backend gRPC services. Discover how our solution leverages the advanced capabilities of gRPC for enhanced performance, low latency, and multi-language support, while achieving seamless integration with our established Rest.li framework. We will dive into the motivations behind adopting this strategy, the intricate challenges encountered, and the significant improvements in developer experience and productivity it brings. With real-world examples and performance benchmarks, witness how this approach modernizes our service infrastructure, leading to more efficient and scalable solutions.

Speakers

Ethan Shen

Staff Software Engineer, LinkedIn

I have over five years of experience working with GraphQL, applying the technology across both backend and frontend systems. I currently serve as a Staff Engineer and Tech Lead of the GraphQL Infrastructure team at LinkedIn.

Wednesday September 10, 2025 13:45 - 14:15 BST
Studio

GraphQL in Production - Federation and distributed systems

Audience Level Intermediate

13:45 BST

The Two GraphQLs - Andrei Bocan & Andreas Marek, Atlassian

Wednesday September 10, 2025 13:45 - 14:15 BST

IJzaal

When adopting GraphQL, teams diligently follow "best practices" without realizing they're actually choosing between two fundamentally different approaches: designing schemas to serve UI components (frontend-first) or to represent domain models (structure-first). This distinction is rarely framed as an explicit choice in GraphQL literature, with most examples showcasing the structure-first approach by default.

Yet this initial decision shapes everything from your team structure to how you handle breaking changes—and if you start with a structure-first approach, it's especially difficult to unwind that decision later. In this session, we'll explore the critical differences between these philosophies, examine how they manifest in real schemas, and analyze the trade-offs each approach presents. You'll see how changes that feel natural in one approach become deeply problematic in the other, and learn to identify which patterns your team has already begun to follow.

Speakers

Andreas Marek

Developer, Atlassian

GraphQL TSC Member and GraphQL Java founder. Working on all things GraphQL at Atlassian.

Andrei Bocan

Principal Engineer, Atlassian

Andrei is a professional book hoarder who frequently complains about software.

Wednesday September 10, 2025 13:45 - 14:15 BST
IJzaal

GraphQL in Production - Schema evolution

Audience Level Intermediate

14:45 BST

Efficient Semantic Comparison of GraphQL Queries - Duckki Oe, Apollo GraphQL

Wednesday September 10, 2025 14:45 - 14:55 BST

IJzaal

Ever wondered if two seemingly different GraphQL queries actually return the same data? Or how to ensure that complex queries—packed with type conditions and directives like @skip/@include—still mean the same thing after a major refactor? In this talk, we’ll explore a novel static analysis technique that efficiently checks whether one query’s response is always a subset of another’s. By performing this subset test in both directions, we can reliably determine query equivalence—bringing new clarity to complex GraphQL operations.

Speakers

Duckki Oe

Staff Software Engineer, Apollo GraphQL

Duckki is an engineer at Apollo GraphQL, working on Apollo Federation. With a decade of experience building static analysis tools to detect bugs and security vulnerabilities, he’s passionate about making GraphQL more reliable and efficient. Duckki holds a PhD from the University... Read More →

Wednesday September 10, 2025 14:45 - 14:55 BST
IJzaal

Developer Experience - Testing

Audience Level Intermediate

15:05 BST

Building Resilient APIs: Techniques for Easy and Effective Error Handling - Jesper Rasmussen, The LEGO Group

Wednesday September 10, 2025 15:05 - 15:35 BST

Studio

Error handling is a critical aspect of developing robust GraphQL applications. Misuse or misunderstanding of errors can lead to applications that fail to function correctly, causing frustration for both developers and users.

In this talk, we explore how to effectively manage errors in GraphQL, ensuring they are wrapped in a useful way, the implementation details are hidden behind them, and common design pitfalls are avoided.

Speakers

Jesper Rasmussen

Principal Engineer, The LEGO Group

Jesper Rasmussen is a Principal Engineer at The LEGO Group with a passion for building great developer experiences. He’s been working with GraphQL since 2016 across several companies, leading transformation projects and helping teams get the most out of their APIs. Outside of work... Read More →

Wednesday September 10, 2025 15:05 - 15:35 BST
Studio

Developer Experience - Patterns and community trends

Audience Level Intermediate

15:05 BST

“One Scheme To Rule Them All”: Simplifying 10+ Mediaset Apps With One Single GraphQL Service - Marco Reni, Mediaset

Wednesday September 10, 2025 15:05 - 15:35 BST

Grote Zaal

Mediaset, one of Europe largest free broadcasters, owns and manages more than ten consumer-facing applications across web, mobile, and smart TV platforms, leading the Media and Entertainment ecosystem in Italy and Europe. Historically, each of these apps (managed by distinct development teams) interacted directly with several different backend APIs to serve content to customers, resulting in redundant development efforts, inconsistencies between platforms and enormous and useless network transfers.

In this session we will present how, by creating a carefully designed GraphQL schema, we managed to transition each of them to a more streamlined approach, where the backend complexity and variety is hidden from the frontend integrations. We will dive into the choices made, the GraphQL features that we leveraged (one among all, Trusted Documents to exploit CDNs and improve security), the issues that we've encountered while building the system, and the benefits that we gained from all perspectives: user experience, development perspective, feature delivery and time to market.

Speakers

Marco Reni

Architect, Mediaset - MFE

Marco Reni is an Architect at Mediaset (MFE), the biggest broadcaster in Italy and one of the largest free broadcasters in Europe. He is in charge of all the frontend architectures and services. Over the years, he has taken responsibility of several high profile projects - including... Read More →

Wednesday September 10, 2025 15:05 - 15:35 BST
Grote Zaal

GraphQL in Production - Case studies

Audience Level Intermediate