The Little Book of GraphQL Schema Design

Over the last few years, I had the chance to work on two of the biggest public GraphQL APIs out there. I’ve observed the good, the bad, and ugly in these GraphQL schemas. The Little Book of GraphQL Schema Design is a collection of learnings on what I have seen work well, and not so well when it comes to designing great GraphQL APIs.

The book will cover how domain driven design can help us build a great GraphQL API, best practices when migrating from other API approaches, common anti-patterns, GraphQL Mutations, evolution of GraphQL schemas, public APIs, and much more.

The book is language agnostic and heavily uses the GraphQL SDL to provide examples. So no matter how you build your GraphQL APIs, it should come in very useful. As this is a subject that evolves a lot, the book will be online, meaning it will be continuously evolved as my learnings continue. It might eventually be available as PDF / paper.

GraphQL being quite a young approach to building APIs, I always found there was a lack of resources on how to design a great schema using GraphQLs type system. I really hope this book can help you all build more expressive GraphQL schemas that are great to use for your integrators and evolve well with time.

Hi 👋! My name is Marc-André, although you might have seen me more under "xuorig" on the internet.

For the past few years I have been very interested in software design and architecture, API design, and more recently became very interested in applying this to GraphQL. I am currently working at GitHub on the Ecosystem team, helping the team by providing tools and guidance around building GraphQL APIs. Previously, I was at Shopify, working on very similar things.

This experience made me realize and learn a lot on what is needed to build and maintain large GraphQL APIs in production. Over the past year, I have been sharing a lot of these learnings in the form of blog posts and talks. Seeing how some of you liked reading and hearing these learnings, I have recently started writing "The Little Book of GraphQL Design".

It would mean a lot to me if you subscribed to get updates on the book ❤️. As I am finishing it, I plan on releasing some chapters as blog posts, so stay tuned!