Joe Karlsson

Software Engineer and Developer Advocate at MongoDB

Bio

Joe Karlsson is a software engineer turned Developer Advocate at MongoDB. He comes from the frozen tundra of Minneapolis, Minnesota (and yes, it does get really cold here, and no, not everyone here has the accent from the movie). Joe has been primarily a Node and JavaScript engineer. He has been writing, teaching, and talking about code his entire career. Sharing what he knows and continuing to learn about programming is truly the thing he loves doing the most.

Joe is the co-creator of open source software, including bechdel.io, a web app that tells you if a movie script passes the Bechdel Test or not. In his free time, he is usually drinking Gin and Tonics, eating at a new restaurant, or tinkering on a new art project or open source project.

Building Your First GraphQL Client in JS

GraphQL is the future of API. Together we will start with the basics and the philosophy behind GraphQL. By the end, you will leave with a working GraphQL server while we explore real world patterns.

RESTful APIs have been around for a while now, but they are flawed. Things like non-standard CRUD operations, response validation, error handling, in-memory state management, etc. just get really hard. In this talk, you will learn how GraphQL - a standard that unifies server and client communication - comes to save the day, and why the tooling around it is a game-changer.

We will answer the following questions. What is the philosophy behind GraphQL? How do you architect a scalable schema? How can GraphQL boost productivity? How can you avoid common pitfalls?

We will then get a GraphQL server up and running while focusing on exploring real-world patterns for architecting our schema. We will discuss and implement practical steps to improve query performance, error handling and caching.