GraphQLConf 2026: Full Schedule

May 19 - 20 | In-Person Only
GraphQLConf 2026 website

The Sched app allows you to build your schedule but you must also be registered for GraphQLConf 2026 to participate in the sessions.

Please note: This schedule is automatically displayed in Pacific Daylight Time (UTC-7). 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.

8:00am PDT

Solutions Showcase

Tuesday May 19, 2026 8:00am - 5:40pm PDT

Foyer

In order to facilitate networking and business relationships at the event, you may choose to visit a third party’s booth or access sponsored content. You are never required to visit third party booths or to access sponsored content. When visiting a booth or participating in sponsored activities, the third party will receive some of your registration data. This data includes your first name, last...
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Tuesday May 19, 2026 8:00am - 5:40pm PDT
Foyer

Solutions Showcase

8:00am PDT

Registration + Badge Pick-up

Tuesday May 19, 2026 8:00am - 5:45pm PDT

Foyer

Tuesday May 19, 2026 8:00am - 5:45pm PDT
Foyer

Registration + Badge Pick-up

9:00am PDT

Keynote: Opening Remarks - Janette Cheng, Software Engineer, Meta

Tuesday May 19, 2026 9:00am - 9:05am PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

Speakers

Janette Cheng

Software Engineer, Meta

Working on the GraphQL client and build infrastructure for mobile apps at Meta

Tuesday May 19, 2026 9:00am - 9:05am PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

Keynote Sessions

Audience Level Any

9:05am PDT

Keynote: GraphQL Foundation Update - Lee Byron, Co-Creator of GraphQL and Director, GraphQL Foundation

Tuesday May 19, 2026 9:05am - 9:15am PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

Speakers

Lee Byron

Co-creator of GraphQL and Director, GraphQL Foundation

Foundation Update, Lee Byron GraphQLConf pdf

Tuesday May 19, 2026 9:05am - 9:15am PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

Keynote Sessions

Audience Level Any
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

9:15am PDT

Sponsored Keynote: Shaping New GraphQL Patterns from Strong Baselines - Uri Goldshtein, CEO, The Guild

Tuesday May 19, 2026 9:15am - 9:20am PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

Speakers

Uri Goldshtein

CEO, The Guild

Shaping New GraphQL Patterns from Strong Baselines, Uri Goldshtein GraphQLConf 2026 pdf

Tuesday May 19, 2026 9:15am - 9:20am PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

Keynote Sessions

Audience Level Any
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

9:25am PDT

Keynote: Built to Evolve: 13 Years of GraphQL - Elena Bukareva, Software Engineering Manager & Braxton Bragg, Senior Product Manager, Meta

Tuesday May 19, 2026 9:25am - 9:45am PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

In 2015, we promised GraphQL would be "easy to learn and use". Ten years, and hundreds of billions of daily API calls later, we've learned that not all our hopes and promises turned out to be true. This keynote is an honest retrospective from inside Meta. We'll share which assumptions didn't survive contact with thousands of engineers, the complexity traps we fell into, and what’s driving the...
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Speakers

Elena Bukareva

Software Engineering Manager, Meta

Software Engineering Manager at Meta, leading the Mobile GraphQL Platform. Focused on building scalable, intuitive GraphQL infrastructure and tooling that powers mobile experiences at global scale. Passionate about platform engineering, API design, and enabling product teams to move... Read More →

Braxton Bragg

Senior Product Manager, Meta

Product manager with 13 years experience on a variety of consumer-facing products. I currently support the Mobile GraphQL platform at Meta.

Tuesday May 19, 2026 9:25am - 9:45am PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

Keynote Sessions

Audience Level Any

9:50am PDT

Keynote: Creating a Golden Path for GraphQL - Benjie Gillam, Maintainer, Graphile & Kewei Qu, Software Engineer, Meta

Tuesday May 19, 2026 9:50am - 10:00am PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

GraphQL's precise specification gives us incredible interoperability and a rich ecosystem of tooling to be used with any compliant GraphQL service... And yet, that hasn't led to every adopter of GraphQL having a great experience. Some leave disillusioned with performance pitfalls, security concerns, and unforeseen complexity. This can be frustrating for successful GraphQL practitioners since in...
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Speakers

Benjie Gillam

Maintainer, Graphile

A self-described "community-funded open source maintainer," Benjie dedicates much of his time to open source, made possible by the support of appreciative and forward-thinking individuals and organizations. He can often be found helping contributors advance their proposals, and has... Read More →

Kewei Qu

Software Engineer, Meta Platforms

TBD

Creating a Golden Path for GraphQL.pptx (1) pdf

Tuesday May 19, 2026 9:50am - 10:00am PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

Keynote Sessions

Audience Level Any
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

10:00am PDT

Keynote: GraphQL in the AI Era - Matt DeBergalis, CEO and Co-Founder, Apollo GraphQL

Tuesday May 19, 2026 10:00am - 10:05am PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

A year ago, we forecast an important role for GraphQL in an AI future. That prediction has come true, with GraphQL now serving as the foundation of critical AI initiatives at household brands in retail, hospitality, health care and many more. Just as importantly, GraphQL's declarative entity-based architecture has proven to be an ideal match for modern agentic development. In this talk, we'll...
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Speakers

Matt DeBergalis

CEO and co-founder, Apollo GraphQL

GraphQL 2026 Apollo Matt DeBergalis pdf

Tuesday May 19, 2026 10:00am - 10:05am PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

Keynote Sessions

Audience Level Any
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

10:05am PDT

Keynote: Closing Remarks - Janette Cheng, Software Engineer, Meta

Tuesday May 19, 2026 10:05am - 10:10am PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

Speakers

Janette Cheng

Software Engineer, Meta

Working on the GraphQL client and build infrastructure for mobile apps at Meta

Tuesday May 19, 2026 10:05am - 10:10am PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

Keynote Sessions

Audience Level Any

10:10am PDT

Break

Tuesday May 19, 2026 10:10am - 10:30am PDT

Foyer

Tuesday May 19, 2026 10:10am - 10:30am PDT
Foyer

Breaks + Networking + Special Events

10:30am PDT

Safely Merging Subgraphs in a Distributed World - Clarice Abreu & Rodrigo Jesus, Brex

Tuesday May 19, 2026 10:30am - 10:55am PDT

Grand Ballroom I

In the rush to "break the monolith" through GraphQL Federation, organizations can go too far and end up with an explosion of subgraphs. At scale, this can lead to a different kind of pain: high operational overhead, reliability issues, and ultimately, a degraded graph quality. This session explores how to pivot from "splitting" to "merging" without impacting the customer. The presentation will...
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Speakers

Clarice Abreu

Senior Software Engineer, Brex

Clarice Abreu leads the roadmap and strategy for the Brex's GraphQL platform. She drives initiatives to improve schema quality, schema validation and observability, helping teams build and evolve a large-scale federated GraphQL architecture.

Rodrigo Jesus

Senior Software Engineer, Brex

Rodrigo Jesus is a Senior Software Engineer at Brex's Application Infrastructure team focused on taming complexity in large distributed systems. He currently leads service smashing and domain consolidation efforts that reduce fragmentation, lower operational overhead, and improve... Read More →

Safely Merging Subgraphs in a Distributed World pdf

Tuesday May 19, 2026 10:30am - 10:55am PDT
Grand Ballroom I

Federation + Distributed Systems

Audience Level Intermediate
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

10:30am PDT

Sponsored Session: Federation, Reversed: A Consumer-First Future with Fission - David Stutt, Wundergraph

Tuesday May 19, 2026 10:30am - 10:55am PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

GraphQL Federation traditionally takes a bottom-up approach: individual service schemas are defined first, and the final federated API emerges from the federation algorithm. However, GraphQL's strength is enabling APIs that are designed around what consumers actually need. A bottom-up model can make it harder to intentionally design the federated API surface. In this talk we introduce Fission, a...
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Speakers

David Stutt

Senior Founding Software Engineer, Wundergraph

David is one of the four founding engineers at WunderGraph who collectively built the software foundations of the company. David's career began in the finance sector of software engineering before moving exclusively to API management in 2022. From that point, David started his deep-dive... Read More →

FederationReversed pdf

Tuesday May 19, 2026 10:30am - 10:55am PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

Federation + Distributed Systems

Audience Level Intermediate
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

10:30am PDT

React Server Components Vs. GraphQL - Jordan Eldredge, Meta

Tuesday May 19, 2026 10:30am - 10:55am PDT

Boardroom

React Server Components (RSC) and GraphQL have considerable overlap in the problems they seek to solve. This makes them competitors in some scenarios. In this talk we’ll recount the origins of RSCs at Meta as a prototype within the Relay GraphQL client, discuss how to choose between the two technologies, and end with an exploration of architectures in which they both might reasonably coexist...
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Speakers

Jordan Eldredge

Software Engieer, Meta

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

GraphQL vs. RSC Jordan Eldredge pdf

Tuesday May 19, 2026 10:30am - 10:55am PDT
Boardroom

Servers

Audience Level Intermediate
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

11:05am PDT

Lightning Talk: The 40,000-field Query: Optimizations for Gigantic High-QPS Operations - Gary Zeng, Meta

Tuesday May 19, 2026 11:05am - 11:15am PDT

Grand Ballroom I

Parsing a GraphQL query generally has negligible cost. But what happens your front page query has millions of QPS, 10s of thousands of fields, and there are hundreds of versions of the query? At Meta, we've found that parsing becomes a significant bottle neck under these constraints. In this talk, we dive into server-side optimizations we built to handle persisted documents beyond simple LRU...
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Speakers

Gary Zeng

Software Engineer, GraphQL Platform, Meta

Gary is a Software Engineer working on Meta's GraphQL engine powering one of the worlds largest schemas. He focuses the balance between language design and system reliability. In the physical world, Gary has hosted over 1000 hours of Dungeons and Dragons.

GraphQL Conf Gary Zeng pdf

Tuesday May 19, 2026 11:05am - 11:15am PDT
Grand Ballroom I

Production Insights - Huge Scale

Audience Level Intermediate
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

11:05am PDT

Big Graphs, Tiny Contexts: Dev Tools for Agents - Stephen Spalding & Kavitha Srinivasan, Netflix

Tuesday May 19, 2026 11:05am - 11:30am PDT

Boardroom

How do you make one of the world's largest federated graphs accessible to token-constrained LLM minions? With hundreds of teams contributing to or consuming GraphQL APIs at Netflix, good tools are critical. Today, our GraphQL platform supports engineers across the entire dev lifecycle. However, the nature of developer tooling is rapidly changing. It’s no longer enough to have a pretty UI if...
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Speakers

Stephen Spalding

Engineer, Netflix

Stephen is a member of the Edge API team at Netflix and a member of the GraphQL TSC. 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... Read More →

Kavitha Srinivasan

Staff Software Engineer, Netflix Inc.

Kavitha Srinivasan is a member of the GraphQL platform team at Netflix that operates one of the largest federated graphs and provides developer tools. She has also been a core contributor and maintainer of the Domain Graph Services framework, an open source framework for building... Read More →

Tuesday May 19, 2026 11:05am - 11:30am PDT
Boardroom

AI and LLMs

Audience Level Intermediate

11:05am PDT

Service-to-service GraphQL: The New Sweet Spot! - Mark Larah, Yelp

Tuesday May 19, 2026 11:05am - 11:30am PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

Using GraphQL for service-to-service communication has historically been....frowned upon. Certainly, in isolation, there are compelling alternatives (gRPC, thrift, good ol' REST). But in the age of LLMs and SDUI (Server Driven UI), there's lot of data whizzing around microservices. Does GraphQL fit this use case? I'll argue...yes! You could define your data models with a combination of REST,...
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Speakers

Mark Larah

Group Tech Lead, Yelp

Tuesday May 19, 2026 11:05am - 11:30am PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

Servers

Audience Level Intermediate

11:20am PDT

Lightning Talk: GraphQL: The Internal Agentic API - Christopher Chedeau, Meta

Tuesday May 19, 2026 11:20am - 11:30am PDT

Grand Ballroom I

How do you expose all the internal tools to the Agents is the question everyone is asking today. Turns out we already expose all the things people can do with our internal tools at Meta through GraphQL and LLM Agents are now able to write GraphQL queries, so... come to this talk to see how both work wonderfully together!

Speakers

Christopher Chedeau

Front-end Engineer, Meta

Co-creator of React Native and Prettier. Creator of Excalidraw, "CSS-in-JS", Yoga and React Conf.

Tuesday May 19, 2026 11:20am - 11:30am PDT
Grand Ballroom I

AI and LLMs

Audience Level Beginner

11:40am PDT

From Query to Conversation: GraphQL as an AI Interface Layer - Hugh Nguyen & Adam Conrad, Meta

Tuesday May 19, 2026 11:40am - 12:05pm PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

How do you teach AI to navigate GraphQL schemas with thousands of fields? At Meta, we built an AI system that dynamically discovers and loads subschemas on-demand, enabling natural language interactions with complex enterprise APIs.This talk shares hard-won lessons from building production AI that performs real-time schema exploration, manages dynamic subschema composition, and generates...
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Speakers

Hugh Nguyen

Software Engineer, Meta

Hugh Nguyen is a Software Engineer working on Metamate team at Meta, which builds AI powered products and platforms. Hugh is working on enabling AI agents to access all internal knowledge through GraphQL, a novel approach to rapidly expand AI agent's capabilities.

Adam Conrad

Engineering Manager, Meta

Engineering Manager for integrating GraphQL in our mobile applications at Meta. Previously focused on React at Meta.

Slides PDF (1) pdf

Tuesday May 19, 2026 11:40am - 12:05pm PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

AI and LLMs

Audience Level Intermediate
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

11:40am PDT

The State of GraphQL Agent Skills - Dale Seo, Apollo GraphQL

Tuesday May 19, 2026 11:40am - 12:05pm PDT

Grand Ballroom I

AI coding agents are now a daily reality for GraphQL developers, yet there's a persistent gap between what agents can do and what they actually know. Without guidance, they generate anonymous queries, skip variables, rely on deprecated patterns, and miss conventions experienced teams consider obvious. Every conversation starts from zero. Agent Skills are an emerging answer: a lightweight, open...
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Speakers

Dale Seo

Software Engineer, Apollo GraphQL

Helping developers help the world 🧑‍🚀🚀

The State of GraphQL Agent Skills pdf

Tuesday May 19, 2026 11:40am - 12:05pm PDT
Grand Ballroom I

AI and LLMs

Audience Level Beginer
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

11:40am PDT

Shopify's Breadth-First Bet: Rethinking GraphQL Execution - Greg MacWilliam, Shopify

Tuesday May 19, 2026 11:40am - 12:05pm PDT

Boardroom

Pretty much every major GraphQL execution implementation follows the same pattern: depth-first traversal. But the spec doesn’t require this. At Shopify, we challenged that status quo and rewrote GraphQL execution to run breadth-first. Here’s how it works: instead of running a field resolver repeatedly across each object in a list during its depth pass, we execute each field resolver only once...
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Speakers

Greg MacWilliam

Staff Software Engineer, Shopify

Greg is an API Foundations engineer at Shopify focused on GraphQL scalability and performance. He’s an open-source contributor on several GraphQL projects, and author of The Schema Stitching Handbook. Coder. Dad. Likes dogs, juggles fire.

breadth first execution pdf

Tuesday May 19, 2026 11:40am - 12:05pm PDT
Boardroom

Performance

Audience Level Intermediate
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

12:15pm PDT

Sponsored Session: Closing the Loop: How GraphQL Gives Coding Agents Eyes on What Actually Matters - Michael Staib, Chillicream

Tuesday May 19, 2026 12:15pm - 12:40pm PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

Coding agents are reshaping how we build software. Implementing features, refactoring systems, and shipping changes at a pace unthinkable 6 months ago. But to be successful with agents you need the right feedback loop. One that guides your agent to success, not into the spiral of death. Ask Claude to add a review system to your product API. Without knowing what's in use, it might reshape your...
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Speakers

Michael Staib

CEO, ChilliCream

Michael is a member of the GraphQL Technical Steering Committee, a Microsoft MVP, and Co-Founder and CEO of ChilliCream. He is the creator of Hot Chocolate, a widely used GraphQL server and client platform for .NET, and one of the authors of the Composite Schema specification. Michael... Read More →

Tuesday May 19, 2026 12:15pm - 12:40pm PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

AI and LLMs

Audience Level Intermediate

12:15pm PDT

An Alternative To JSON Responses: Argo in WhatsApp - Kevin Gorham, Meta

Tuesday May 19, 2026 12:15pm - 12:40pm PDT

Boardroom

Optimizing wire size is in WhatsApp's DNA. In the early days, we transformed verbose XML into a compact binary protocol (WAP) that helped us serve users worldwide on constrained networks. Now, as we migrate to GraphQL, we faced a new challenge: JSON responses were 30% larger than WAP-encoded equivalents. This talk tells the story of how we solved that problem—by leveraging GraphQL's type system...
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Speakers

Kevin Gorham

Software Engineer, Meta

Shepherding client-side GraphQL at WhatsApp.

GraphQLConf 2026 — Argo in WhatsApp v4 pdf

Tuesday May 19, 2026 12:15pm - 12:40pm PDT
Boardroom

Performance

Audience Level Intermediate
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

12:15pm PDT

The Internal Lens: GraphQL Gateways From a Different Axis - Angel Svirkov, trivago

Tuesday May 19, 2026 12:15pm - 12:40pm PDT

Grand Ballroom I

GraphQL is often framed around multiple clients, external consumers, and solving over/under-fetching. But what if you have one client, fragmented internal APIs, and colleagues as your consumers? This talk explores that different axis—and why GraphQL still matters. At trivago, we built a second GraphQL Gateway to unify internal services. What started as admin tooling became something more: a...
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Speakers

Angel Svirkov

Software Engineer, trivago

Angel Svirkov is a Software Engineer at trivago, Germany. Over 10 years, he has bridged product needs and engineering realities—owning problems end-to-end from discovery through architecture, implementation, rollout, and operations. For the past six years, this work has centered... Read More →

The Internal Lens pdf

Tuesday May 19, 2026 12:15pm - 12:40pm PDT
Grand Ballroom I

Production Insights - Regular Scale

Audience Level Intermediate
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

12:40pm PDT

Lunch

Tuesday May 19, 2026 12:40pm - 2:10pm PDT

Foyer + Bistro 880

Tuesday May 19, 2026 12:40pm - 2:10pm PDT
Foyer + Bistro 880

Breaks + Networking + Special Events

2:10pm PDT

Lightning Talk: Schema Composition Without Federation - Matt Mahoney, Meta

Tuesday May 19, 2026 2:10pm - 2:20pm PDT

Grand Ballroom I

In a world where context is limited, what do we need from GraphQL to build composable, type safe products?

Speakers

Matt Mahoney

Software Engineer, Meta

I work on Meta's Mobile GraphQL team.

Schema Composition Without Federation pdf

Tuesday May 19, 2026 2:10pm - 2:20pm PDT
Grand Ballroom I

Clients

Audience Level Intermediate
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

2:10pm PDT

Lower Latency With Streaming GraphQL - Rob Richard, 1stDibs

Tuesday May 19, 2026 2:10pm - 2:35pm PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

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...
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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.

Defer and Stream GraphQL Conf 2026 pdf

Tuesday May 19, 2026 2:10pm - 2:35pm PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

Performance

Audience Level Intermediate
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

2:10pm PDT

Teach Yourself GraphQL in 2026: An Anti-blueprint - Jeff Auriemma, Apollo

Tuesday May 19, 2026 2:10pm - 2:35pm PDT

Boardroom

After eleven years as an open source technology, GraphQL has never had a more favorable learning curve. Clearer mental models, better educational materials, and a deeper collective understanding of best practices have transformed the “wild west” of 2015 to a much more manageable landscape today. You and your team are unique, so rather than a one-size-fits-all blueprint I thought I’d present...
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Speakers

Jeff Auriemma

Senior Software Engineer, Apollo

Hi, I'm Jeff! I support the Apollo Client, Apollo iOS, Apollo Kotlin, and Apollo Server engineers at Apollo as a manager. Before going into software I was a trombonist and public school music teacher. In my free time I like to bake Chicago-style deep dish pizzas and French macaro... Read More →

Tuesday May 19, 2026 2:10pm - 2:35pm PDT
Boardroom

Tooling + DX + Testing + Documentation

Audience Level Beginner

2:25pm PDT

Lightning Talk: Making GraphQL Fun for the Backend Too - Stephen Haberman, Homebound

Tuesday May 19, 2026 2:25pm - 2:35pm PDT

Grand Ballroom I

GraphQL is a technology well-loved by frontend engineers, but often leaves backend engineers struggling with boilerplate code and N+1 performance issues. This talk introduces Joist, a "GraphQL-first" TypeScript ORM that uses codegen, resolver scaffolding, and deep dataloader integration to bring Rails-level productivity to Homebound's 500+ table GraphQL/Postgres majestic monolith.

Speakers

Stephen Haberman

Software Engineer, Homebound

With two decades of experience, Stephen is a seasoned software engineer known for delivering robust systems that drive business value, while also being a passionate builder at heart, crafting codebases that developers (hopefully!) enjoy working in.

Tuesday May 19, 2026 2:25pm - 2:35pm PDT
Grand Ballroom I

Tooling + DX + Testing + Documentation

Audience Level Intermediate

2:45pm PDT

Lightning Talk: Resolvers Everywhere: Rethinking Client and Server Boundaries in GraphQL - Janette Cheng, Meta

Tuesday May 19, 2026 2:45pm - 2:55pm PDT

Boardroom

In GraphQL, a resolver is defined as “the internal function for determining the resolved value of a field.” Traditionally, resolvers live exclusively on the server—but should they? Many teams find themselves either duplicating business logic on the client or pushing client-specific concerns into backend code when trying to treat server models as view models. This talk explores an...
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Speakers

Janette Cheng

Software Engineer, Meta

Working on the GraphQL client and build infrastructure for mobile apps at Meta

resolvers everywhere pdf

Tuesday May 19, 2026 2:45pm - 2:55pm PDT
Boardroom

Clients

Audience Level Intermediate
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

2:45pm PDT

Bringing GraphQL Natively To Relational Databases With AI - Shashank Gugnani, Oracle

Tuesday May 19, 2026 2:45pm - 3:10pm PDT

Grand Ballroom I

GraphQL offers a popular way for developers to access and interact with data. However, integrating GraphQL with enterprise databases often requires custom middleware, complex resolvers, and maintenance overhead. With Oracle AI Database 26ai, this changes: developers can now use GraphQL queries natively in the database, leveraging automated schema inference and built-in parsing with no loss of...
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Speakers

Shashank Gugnani

Senior Software Development Manager, Oracle

I am an engineering manager in the Database Transactions team at Oracle, working on the design and implementation of next-generation Oracle database products. I hold a PhD in Computer Science from Ohio State and an undergraduate degree in Computer Science from BITS-Pilani. My research... Read More →

Tuesday May 19, 2026 2:45pm - 3:10pm PDT
Grand Ballroom I

AI and LLMs

Audience Level Any

2:45pm PDT

Scaling Real-Time: Building Federated Subscriptions in Rust - Denis Badurina, The Guild

Tuesday May 19, 2026 2:45pm - 3:10pm PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

Our journey implementing federated GraphQL subscriptions in Hive Router, a high-performance federation gateway written in Rust. Covering the architectural decisions and technical challenges we faced bringing real-time capabilities to a federated environment, the engineering work required to support the full spectrum of subscription transports (WebSockets, SSE, Multipart HTTP and HTTP callbacks),...
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Speakers

Denis Badurina

Denis from The Guild, The Guild

I am a self-taught senior software architect, with a distinguishing trait of resiliently finding simple solutions to complex problems using communication through words and code.

Starting from my first Lego set, I've been in love with development throughout my whole life. As a creator, having the ability to turn thoughts into reality is a gift I find essential. Forever learning through practical applications, bad decisions and positive thoughts - I, ulti... Read More →

Tuesday May 19, 2026 2:45pm - 3:10pm PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

Federation + Distributed Systems

Audience Level Intermediate

3:00pm PDT

Lightning Talk: Breaking up With Inputs (Without Breaking Your Users) - Laurin Quast, The Guild

Tuesday May 19, 2026 3:00pm - 3:10pm PDT

Boardroom

Deprecating fields and removing them in GraphQL is tricky itself, but tooling can help identifying such based on statically analysing operations or traffic. But, deprecating inputs is a whole different challenge! Once clients start sending arguments or input object fields, removing or changing them can break integrations in subtle ways, as you do not know which fields might be used in the future...
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Speakers

Laurin Quast

Developer, The Guild

Laurin Quast is a developer that started exploring GraphQL, by leading API development at a start-up. Realizing that there are still many unsolved problems and challenges within the space, he started contributing to famous JavaScript libraries, such as GraphQL Code Generator. Diving... Read More →

Tuesday May 19, 2026 3:00pm - 3:10pm PDT
Boardroom

Schema Design + Evolution + Governance

Audience Level Beginner

3:20pm PDT

Sponsored Session: Hands Off the Keyboard: An Introduction to Agentic Coding for GraphQL Developers - Erik Bylund, Apollo GraphQL

Tuesday May 19, 2026 3:20pm - 3:45pm PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

Every developer has the same instinct when working with AI: take over. Copy the output, fix it by hand, wonder why AI ""doesn't really work."" That instinct is the problem. When AI-generated code is wrong, the fix isn't editing the code — it's improving the instructions that produced it. This talk teaches that discipline using Agent Skills — open-format markdown workflows — and the GraphQL...
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Speakers

Erik Bylund

Staff Solutions Architect, Apollo GraphQL

Tuesday May 19, 2026 3:20pm - 3:45pm PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

AI and LLMs

Audience Level Intermediate

3:20pm PDT

Was It Worth It? Lessons from Implementing Two GraphQL Routers. In JavaScript and Rust - Arda Tanrıkulu, The Guild

Tuesday May 19, 2026 3:20pm - 3:45pm PDT

Grand Ballroom I

The steps we took at implementing a GraphQL gateway first in JavaScript, and following those steps in Rust again.
Advantages of JavaScript and disadvantage of lack of diversity in the GraphQL Rust ecosystem.
Is Rust worth? Is it just performance? How hard was it to rethink everything done in the JavaScript version?

Speakers

Arda Tanrıkulu

Software Developer, The Guild

Tuesday May 19, 2026 3:20pm - 3:45pm PDT
Grand Ballroom I

Federation + Distributed Systems

Audience Level Intermediate

3:20pm PDT

The Invisible Fortress: Embedding Zero-Trust Governance in the Supergraph - Gaurav Singh & Sulbigar Shanawaz, Capital One

Tuesday May 19, 2026 3:20pm - 3:45pm PDT

Boardroom

In high-stakes industries, a GraphQL schema is more than a technical contract—it is a live map of your enterprise’s risk surface. For security teams, schema modifications are often "black box" events that threaten data integrity. To scale safely, we must move beyond manual gatekeeping to a Zero-Trust Supergraph where security is an invisible, automated fortress. We will present a framework...
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Speakers

Gaurav Singh

Distinguished Engineer, Capital One

Gaurav Singh serves as a Distinguished Engineer and Cybersecurity Architect at Capital One. His contributions were pivotal in the enablement of GraphQL Federation throughout the enterprise, which involved the introduction of open-source GraphQL federation products , a dedicated GraphQL... Read More →

Sulbigar Shanawaz

Distinguished Engineer, Capital One

Sulbigar Shanawaz is a Distinguished Engineer at Capital One, where he leads architectural strategy for the Enterprise Entitlements platform. He specializes in centralizing customer data security by engineering robust validation frameworks for regulatory, compliance, and audit requirements across hig... Read More →

The Invisible Fortress GraphQLConf 2026 External Copy.pptx pdf

Tuesday May 19, 2026 3:20pm - 3:45pm PDT
Boardroom

Security

Audience Level Any
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

3:45pm PDT

Break

Tuesday May 19, 2026 3:45pm - 4:05pm PDT

Foyer

Tuesday May 19, 2026 3:45pm - 4:05pm PDT
Foyer

Breaks + Networking + Special Events

4:05pm PDT

Simplifying MCP Tool Sprawl With GraphQL - Roy Derks, IBM

Tuesday May 19, 2026 4:05pm - 4:30pm PDT

Grand Ballroom I

As teams adopt the Model Context Protocol (MCP), they often run into a new problem: tool sprawl. Every backend API turns into its own MCP server, each with separate schemas, auth, versioning, and deployment concerns. What starts as a clean integration quickly becomes hard to manage. In this talk, I'll show how GraphQL can act as a unifying layer for MCP using GraphQL capabilities like schema...
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Speakers

Roy Derks

Developer Experience, IBM

Roy Derks is a lifelong software developer, author and public speaker from the Netherlands. Currently chasing his dreams in Silicon Valley, California. Roy's mission is to make the world a better place through technology by inspiring developers all over the world, more specifically... Read More →

Tuesday May 19, 2026 4:05pm - 4:30pm PDT
Grand Ballroom I

AI and LLMs

Audience Level Intermediate

4:05pm PDT

The Case Against __typename - Sabrina Wasserman, Meta Platforms Inc.

Tuesday May 19, 2026 4:05pm - 4:30pm PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

The GraphQL Schema Documentation (https://graphql.org/learn/schema/) defines the __typename field as “a special meta-field that automatically exists on every Object type and resolves to the name of that type, providing a way to differentiate between data types on the client.” At Meta, we’ve learned that relying on __typename to delineate type on the client can actually be a foot-gun....
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Speakers

Sabrina Wasserman

Software Engineer, Meta Platforms Inc.

GraphQL client-side frameworks software engineer at Meta.

V2 The Case Against typename pdf

Tuesday May 19, 2026 4:05pm - 4:30pm PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

Clients

Audience Level Intermediate
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

4:05pm PDT

Caching Deep Dive: The Ultimate Way To Speed up Your GraphQL API - Uri Goldshtein, The Guild

Tuesday May 19, 2026 4:05pm - 4:30pm PDT

Boardroom

What we will cover: The "All-or-Nothing" Barrier: We'll analyze the limitations of traditional Document Caching in GraphQL. We will explain why a single personalized field or a volatile "live" value can invalidate an entire response, leading to low cache hit rates and overloaded origin servers. Partial Query Caching (PQC) Architecture: We will introduce a granular approach to caching. You'll...
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Speakers

Uri Goldshtein

CEO, The Guild

Tuesday May 19, 2026 4:05pm - 4:30pm PDT
Boardroom

Tooling + DX + Testing + Documentation

Audience Level Intermediate

4:40pm PDT

Shifting Instagram Development Towards Monolith Server Via Federated Schema - Xiao Han, Chi Chan, Deepak Singh, Kristina Kamendova & Anirudh Padmarao, Meta

Tuesday May 19, 2026 4:40pm - 5:05pm PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

Instagram is moving from a Python monolith to a PHP monolith. Come find out how we leverage GraphQL to define a single API across both monoliths to power major product migrations (e.g. Stories, Reels, Threads) and facilitate incremental development shifts.

Meta’s architectural philosophy favors federation to support a monolithic architecture over traditional microservices.

Speakers

Kristina Kamendova

Software Engineer, Meta

Software Engineer at Instagram Monetization Platform

Deepak Singh

Software Engineer, Meta

Anirudh Padmarao

Software Engineer, Meta

I work on server infrastructure at Instagram.

Xiao Han

Software Engineer, Meta Platform Inc.

Software Engineer on Instagram Product Foundations

Chi Chan

Software Engineer, Meta

GraphQL server side framework at Meta.

GraphQL Conf 2026 Shifting Instagram Development Towards Monolith Server Via Federated Schema pdf

Tuesday May 19, 2026 4:40pm - 5:05pm PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

Federation + Distributed Systems

Audience Level Advanced
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

4:40pm PDT

Scaling GraphQL on AWS: Production Architecture for High-Volume Data Systems - Aishwarya Tirumala, Amazon

Tuesday May 19, 2026 4:40pm - 5:05pm PDT

Boardroom

This presentation explores production-scale GraphQL architecture on AWS, demonstrating how to handle millions of requests and complex data operations at enterprise scale. Drawing from real-world pricing systems that serve thousands of internal clients, we'll examine the architectural decisions behind building resilient, high-performance GraphQL services using AWS AppSync, Lambda, and DynamoDB. The...
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Speakers

Aishwarya Tirumala

Software Development Engineer, Amazon

Aishwarya is a Software Engineer on Amazon's Retail Pricing Platform team, where she builds the GraphQL based infrastructure that powers pricing data access across Amazon's global marketplace. She's passionate about leveraging GraphQL to simplify complex data access patterns and building... Read More →

Tuesday May 19, 2026 4:40pm - 5:05pm PDT
Boardroom

Production Insights - Huge Scale

Audience Level Intermediate

4:40pm PDT

Inverse Conway Maneuver, with GraphQL - Sam Deng, Zillow Group

Tuesday May 19, 2026 4:40pm - 5:05pm PDT

Grand Ballroom I

Left to its own devices, software companies ship its own team structure (Conway’s Law). Scale leads to data silos, unclear ownership, and an incoherent GraphQL schema. Zillow pushes back against this natural entropy.Organizing data post hoc is untenable — trying to keep up with the legions of changing SaaS systems is a losing battle. The schema must be organized at the data producer end. This...
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Speakers

Sam Deng

Senior Principal Engineer, Zillow Group

Senior Principal SDE at Zillow Group by day, avid user by night. Sam Deng is catalyst for foundational platforms that power the Zillow Super App. He is a purveyor of dad jokes, software architect, former runner, and occasional AI-empowered code slinger.

Inverse Conway Maneuver with GraphQL pdf

Tuesday May 19, 2026 4:40pm - 5:05pm PDT
Grand Ballroom I

Schema Design + Evolution + Governance

Audience Level Any
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

5:15pm PDT

Beyond HTTP 200: Observability With GraphQL - Kamil Kisiela, The Guild

Tuesday May 19, 2026 5:15pm - 5:40pm PDT

Grand Ballroom I

To run GraphQL in production with confidence, we need more than just uptime checks and HTTP 200 - we need deep visibility into the graph itself. In this talk, we will explore how to implement the three pillars of observability: traces, metrics, and logs - specifically for GraphQL. We'll explore OTel and GraphQL, allowing you to trace requests from the gateway down to individual Federation...
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Speakers

Kamil Kisiela

Developer, The Guild

Working on GraphQL tooling since before I had a mustache. I'm proud of it (the tooling).

Tuesday May 19, 2026 5:15pm - 5:40pm PDT
Grand Ballroom I

Observability + Telemetry + Tracing

Audience Level Intermediate

5:15pm PDT

Understanding Your Graph, One Hash at a Time - Jens Neuse, WunderGraph

Tuesday May 19, 2026 5:15pm - 5:40pm PDT

Boardroom

Have you ever wished you could better understand how the entities in your graph behave over time? Are they cacheable? How often are they updated? How often are they accessed? What is the distribution of keys? The primitives of GraphQL federation are simple: Entities with keys to uniquely identify them, distributed across multiple services. The story they tell? It's a fascinating one, but nobody...
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Speakers

Jens Neuse

Jens Neuse (CEO WunderGraph), WunderGraph

Jens is a father to 3 kids, tries to be a good husband, is the author and a maintainer of graphql-go-tools for more than 6 years, and the CEO and Co-Founder of WunderGraph, a company that offers Cosmo, an open source GraphQL Federation platform.

Understanding Your Graph, One Hash at a Time — GraphQL Conf 2026 pdf

Tuesday May 19, 2026 5:15pm - 5:40pm PDT
Boardroom

Observability + Telemetry + Tracing

Audience Level Any
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

5:15pm PDT

Incrementally Adopting GraphQL. The Holy Grail? - Robert Balicki, Pinterest

Tuesday May 19, 2026 5:15pm - 5:40pm PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

Incrementally adopting GraphQL is hard. The shape of the data differs between REST and GraphQL. Components that were designed for one don't automatically work with the other. And migrating by making multiple network requests can worsen performance unacceptably. And big bang refactors? Well, if you believe those will be successful, I have some oceanfront real estate in Nebraska to sell you. Is...
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Speakers

Robert Balicki

Staff engineer, Pinterest

Robert Balicki works as a software engineer at Pinterest. He used to have hair down to his shoulders and play in a rock band. He works on Isograph, which you should check out!

Tuesday May 19, 2026 5:15pm - 5:40pm PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

Production Insights - Regular Scale

Audience Level Any

8:00am PDT

Registration + Badge Pick-up

Wednesday May 20, 2026 8:00am - 5:00pm PDT

Foyer

Wednesday May 20, 2026 8:00am - 5:00pm PDT
Foyer

Registration + Badge Pick-up

8:00am PDT

Solutions Showcase

Wednesday May 20, 2026 8:00am - 5:30pm PDT

Foyer

Wednesday May 20, 2026 8:00am - 5:30pm PDT
Foyer

Solutions Showcase

9:00am PDT

GraphQL All Hands Meeting

Wednesday May 20, 2026 9:00am - 10:00am PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

Help shape the future of GraphQL! Join GraphQL Foundation Board Members, TSC Members, and other community leaders for a public meeting about goals and priorities for 2027, and help us celebrate 2026's wins.

Wednesday May 20, 2026 9:00am - 10:00am PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

All Hands Meeting

10:00am PDT

Break

Wednesday May 20, 2026 10:00am - 10:15am PDT

Foyer

Wednesday May 20, 2026 10:00am - 10:15am PDT
Foyer

Breaks + Networking + Special Events

10:15am PDT

Lightning Talk: GraphQLShield: CWE-Aware Defense in Depth for GraphQL APIs in Go - Ravi Sastry Kadali, Open Source Contributor

Wednesday May 20, 2026 10:15am - 10:25am PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

GraphQL APIs face a unique threat landscape: deeply nested queries cause resource exhaustion, introspection exposes entire schemas, and mutation variables carry injection payloads past traditional WAFs. Yet most Go-based GraphQL servers ship with zero security middleware between HTTP and resolver execution.I introduce GraphQLShield, an open-source Go middleware bringing defense-in-depth to GraphQL...
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Speakers

Ravi Sastry Kadali

Go Ecosystem Contributor & Security Engineer, Open Source Contributor

Ravi Sastry Kadali is a security and systems engineer with over 20 years of experience building production infrastructure across defense, enterprise, and hyperscale consumer platforms — with Go as his tool of choice. He is a contributor to the Go project itself (golang/go), with... Read More →

graphqlshield RaviSastryKadali GraphQLConf 2026 pdf

Wednesday May 20, 2026 10:15am - 10:25am PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

Security

Audience Level Intermediate
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

10:15am PDT

When GraphQL Gets Expensive: Performance & Cost Patterns in Production Serverless Architectures - Harpreet Siddhu, AWS Community Builder & Shravanth Gowda Venkatesh, Independent Researcher

Wednesday May 20, 2026 10:15am - 10:40am PDT

Grand Ballroom I

GraphQL simplifies client development through flexible, expressive data queries. However, in serverless production environments, that flexibility can quietly increase latency and infrastructure cost. In AWS-based architectures using Lambda, DynamoDB, Aurora Serverless, and distributed services, resolver design and query structure directly impact execution time, cold starts, and overall spend....
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Speakers

Harpreet Siddhu

Lead Software Engineer, AWS Community Builder

Harpreet Siddhu is a Lead Software Engineer and AWS Certified Solution Architect, Developer, and CloudOps engineer, AWS community Builder, and AWS road to re:Invent hackathon Champion and with over a decade of experience designing and modernizing cloud-native systems. He specializes... Read More →

Shravanth Venkatesh

AWS Solutions Architect, Independent Researcher

Shravanth is a AWS Certified Solutions Architect and Principal Software Engineer with 8+ years designing and scaling production systems on AWS. Leading teams shipping serverless healthcare platforms across AWS, he saw firsthand how GraphQL's flexibility quietly reshapes cost and performance... Read More →

graphql conf pdf

Wednesday May 20, 2026 10:15am - 10:40am PDT
Grand Ballroom I

Performance

Audience Level Beginner
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

10:15am PDT

Screens on Shuffle: How Netflix Scales Server‑Driven, Ever‑Changing Pages - Sreekanth Ramakrishnan, Netflix

Wednesday May 20, 2026 10:15am - 10:40am PDT

Boardroom

How do you power a product where every page layout, module, and slice of content can change daily—across hundreds of millions of devices—without shipping a new client every time? In this talk, we’ll dive into how Netflix evolved its GraphQL APIs from traditional “data fetching” into a server‑driven UI platform, enabling rapid product innovation and page updates without requiring app...
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Speakers

Sreekanth Ramakrishnan

Senior Software Engineer, Netflix

Sreekanth Ramakrishnan is a Senior Software Engineer on the Member API team at Netflix, where he works on systems that power dynamic, real-time experiences in Netflix pages across devices worldwide. He focuses on GraphQL, distributed systems, and server-driven UI architecture. Prior... Read More →

Screens on Shuffle pdf

Wednesday May 20, 2026 10:15am - 10:40am PDT
Boardroom

Schema Design + Evolution + Governance

Audience Level Any
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

10:30am PDT

Lightning Talk: The @deprecated Journey: Five Stops From Schema Hint To Gateway Power - Nasser Abouelazm, Bloomberg

Wednesday May 20, 2026 10:30am - 10:40am PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

@deprecated is usually treated as a client-facing hint. However, in federated GraphQL, it can evolve into a set of patterns that shape governance, runtime behavior, observability, and even gateway planning. In this lightning talk, I’ll take @deprecated on a five-stop journey across the federation lifecycle — 1) schema hint, 2) schema shaping, 3) runtime feedback, 4) client-aware telemetry, and...
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Speakers

Nasser Abouelazm

Senior Software Engineer, Bloomberg

A middle school teacher turned web developer, Nasser Abouelazm has always embraced the art of building epic and engaging experiences that delight, educate, and enchant a broad audience of users. As a senior full-stack engineer working to support Bloomberg Media, he is focused on developing... Read More →

Nasser the deprecated journey GraphQLConf26 pdf

Wednesday May 20, 2026 10:30am - 10:40am PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

Schema Design + Evolution + Governance

Audience Level Intermediate
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

10:50am PDT

GraphQL Meets LLMs & Agents: Building Production AI at Starbucks Scale - Sharon Gorla, Starbucks

Wednesday May 20, 2026 10:50am - 11:15am PDT

Boardroom

GraphQL isn't just an API technology—it's the perfect foundation for AI agents and LLM-powered applications. At Starbucks, we built GraphQL platforms at massive scale (180M+ queries/day, 10,000 stores, 31M+ app users) before GenAI became mainstream. Now, as we explore AI integration, we're discovering that GraphQL provides fundamental advantages for AI that are impossible with REST. This talk...
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Speakers

Sharon Gorla

Engineer Lead, Starbucks

I’m an engineering leader with 16+ years of experience driving digital transformation, modernizing systems, and building high-performing teams. At Starbucks, I'm lead engineer for Next‑Gen POS modernization, earned a U.S. patent, and founded the GraphQL Community of Practice... Read More →

GraphQL Meets LLMs Final pdf

Wednesday May 20, 2026 10:50am - 11:15am PDT
Boardroom

AI and LLMs

Audience Level Any
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

10:50am PDT

Modern Apollo Client React - Brennen Davis, Lease End

Wednesday May 20, 2026 10:50am - 11:15am PDT

Grand Ballroom I

Use Apollo Client v4 in React with Tanstack Router. We’ll be using GraphQL code generation from your schema, preloading data at the router level, optmistic updates, and using Apollo’s cache to eliminate unnecessary refetching and rerenders. You’ll see how smart cache usage and colocating queries lets components read data directly where they need it which will reduce prop drilling. The goal...
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Speakers

Brennen Davis

Principal Software Engineer, Lease End

Husband to a beautiful wife and a dad to 2 boys. Video games and programming

apollo client v4 brennen davis pptx

Wednesday May 20, 2026 10:50am - 11:15am PDT
Grand Ballroom I

Clients

Audience Level Intermediate
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

10:50am PDT

Sponsored Panel Discussion: The GraphQL Production Roundtable - Aileen Chen, Airbnb; Clarice Abreu, Brex; Stephen Spalding, Netflix; Moderated by Jory Burson, The Linux Foundation

Wednesday May 20, 2026 10:50am - 11:15am PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

Large engineering organizations now run GraphQL at the center of their product stacks, serving billions of requests across web, mobile, and internal clients. The questions have shifted accordingly. The interesting problems are no longer about whether to adopt GraphQL, or how to write a resolver. They are about what it takes to operate GraphQL reliably, evolve it safely, and scale the humans who...
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Speakers

Stephen Spalding

Engineer, Netflix

Jory Burson

VP of Standards, The Linux Foundation

Jory Burson is the VP of Standards for the Linux Foundation, where she helps projects identify opportunities for standardization and collaborate on specifications. She is an open source developer-turned-standards practitioner, who is passionate about bringing the best of open source... Read More →

Clarice Abreu

Senior Software Engineer, Brex

Aileen Chen

Staff Software Engineer, Airbnb

Wednesday May 20, 2026 10:50am - 11:15am PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

Production Insights - Huge Scale

Audience Level Intermediate

11:25am PDT

Semantic Introspection - Pascal Senn, ChilliCream

Wednesday May 20, 2026 11:25am - 11:50am PDT

Boardroom

GraphQL's rich type system makes it an ideal foundation for agents to explore and work with APIs. The SDL provides the structure agents need to reason about capabilities and data. Queries let them retrieve information, while mutations enable them to take action. In practice, however, production GraphQL schemas are often too large to fit in the context window and difficult to understand without...
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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. Since 2025, I’ve... Read More →

Wednesday May 20, 2026 11:25am - 11:50am PDT
Boardroom

AI and LLMs

Audience Level Intermediate

11:25am PDT

How GraphQL Helped Create Scalability and Stability in the Retirement Space. - Cameron Sechrist, Stax.ai

Wednesday May 20, 2026 11:25am - 11:50am PDT

Grand Ballroom I

Retirement data is surprisingly complicated, from provisions to participant payroll data to plan sponsor's unique needs. This presents a complicated and heavy requirement to fetch data points that provide the value, and regulatory requirements, that third party administrators require. GraphQL provides this, it allows specific data to be fetched at each stage of the plan lifecycle, without...
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Speakers

Cameron Sechrist

Head of Engineering, Stax.ai

Cameron Sechrist is a dynamic software engineer, seasoned entrepreneur, and compliance expert with over a decade of experience driving technological innovation and ensuring robust data security across diverse industries. His entrepreneurial journey began remarkably early, with his... Read More →

Wednesday May 20, 2026 11:25am - 11:50am PDT
Grand Ballroom I

Production Insights - Regular Scale

Audience Level Any

11:25am PDT

Coordinated Access Control with @policy - Huang Minghe, Booking.com

Wednesday May 20, 2026 11:25am - 11:50am PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

At a company like Booking.com, every sensitive field in the GraphQL schema has more than one team with a legitimate claim on it — Security, Identity, Legal, Privacy, Data Governance, the Traffic Gateway, the Federation Platform, and the hundreds of domain teams that own the data itself. When that many stakeholders need to agree on what "authorized" means for a single field, you don't have a...
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Speakers

Huang Minghe

Senior Software Engineer, Booking.com

Minghe is a Senior Engineer at Booking.com with over 15 years of industry experience spanning DevOps, web, and mobile development. Recently, he has been maintaining the GraphQL federation platform at Booking.com, focusing on efficiently managing large scale schemas and federating... Read More →

Coordinated Access Control with @policy — Minghe Huang · Field Notes pdf

Wednesday May 20, 2026 11:25am - 11:50am PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

Security

Audience Level Intermediate
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

12:00pm PDT

GraphQL Embeddings: AI-Powered Dynamic Operations From Schema To IDE - Michael Watson, Self

Wednesday May 20, 2026 12:00pm - 12:25pm PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

What if your GraphQL API could understand what developers need and generate valid operations from plain English? This talk introduces graphql-embedding, an open-source toolkit that parses GraphQL schemas into vector embeddings, stores them in a vector store, and uses a multi-agent LLM pipeline to generate validated GraphQL operations from natural language input. The architecture is fully modular:...
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Speakers

Michael Watson

Principal Developer Relations Engineer, Expedia Group

Michael Watson was Head of Developer Relations at Apollo GraphQL, where he's spent ~8 years helping enterprises adopt GraphQL at scale. He founded the MCP Server Builder Series, a 3,000+ developer community with events in SF, NYC, London, and Amsterdam. Michael has delivered keynotes... Read More →

Wednesday May 20, 2026 12:00pm - 12:25pm PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

AI and LLMs

Audience Level Any

12:00pm PDT

Stop Reviewing Schemas: How Intuit Made Developers Faster by Automating Governance - Oleks Bidiuk, Intuit

Wednesday May 20, 2026 12:00pm - 12:25pm PDT

Grand Ballroom I

Abstract: Schema governance shouldn’t grind development to a halt or burn out graph stewardship teams. As Intuit’s Supergraph ecosystem grew, our reliance on manual schema reviews created bottlenecks that slowed onboarding and frustrated developers. We knew we needed a better approach — so we built a hybrid governance model that puts Schema Co-Pilot directly into the developer workflow and...
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Speakers

Oleks Bidiuk

Senior Software Engineer, Intuit

Senior Software Engineer at Intuit with 10+ years of evolution from JavaScript roots to complex systems. Outside the IDE, I bridge the gap between digital and tactile as a craftsman. I’m currently restoring the last "analog" Porsche 911—a hands-on project spanning everything from... Read More →

GraphQLConf 2026 Intuit Stop Reviewing Schemas (Oleks Bidiuk) pptx

Wednesday May 20, 2026 12:00pm - 12:25pm PDT
Grand Ballroom I

Schema Design + Evolution + Governance

Audience Level Advanced
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

12:00pm PDT

The Biggest Change To GraphQL Codegen in 10 Years - Eddy Nguyen, The Guild & SEEK & Igor Kusakov, Yelp

Wednesday May 20, 2026 12:00pm - 12:25pm PDT

Boardroom

GraphQL Codegen has been the go-to tool for generating types for GraphQL clients for over a decade. But as use cases grew, so did the friction: excessive generated code, complex setups, and growing confusion among users on how to use the output. In this talk, we'll explore a new client-focused Codegen setup that rethinks those trade-offs. You'll see how we drastically reduce generated output,...
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Speakers

Eddy Nguyen

Software Developer, The Guild

Eddy is a Lead Engineer at SEEK, where he builds GraphQL-driven applications by day. By night, he moonlights at The Guild as a GraphQL Code Generator maintainer—with the unrelenting support of his two cats.

Igor Kusakov

Senior Developer, Yelp

Seasoned full-stack sorcerer with 20+ years crafting scalable web empires, from Montreal's tech trenches to global gigs at spots like Yelp and beyond.

biggest change codegen graphqlconf 2026 pdf

Wednesday May 20, 2026 12:00pm - 12:25pm PDT
Boardroom

Tooling + DX + Testing + Documentation

Audience Level Beginner
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

12:25pm PDT

Lunch

Wednesday May 20, 2026 12:25pm - 1:55pm PDT

Foyer + Bistro 880

Wednesday May 20, 2026 12:25pm - 1:55pm PDT
Foyer + Bistro 880

Breaks + Networking + Special Events

1:55pm PDT

A GraphQL-inspired Orchestration Language for the AI Era - Martijn Walraven, Apollo

Wednesday May 20, 2026 1:55pm - 2:20pm PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

GraphQL and Federation solve real problems: replacing hand-written orchestration with a declarative, typed contract between clients and backends. That model works. But the landscape is shifting — AI agents are becoming first-class API clients, and they need to compose across services, reshape responses, and build workflows faster than coordinated schema design allows. The core insight: one...
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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.

Wednesday May 20, 2026 1:55pm - 2:20pm PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

AI and LLMs

Audience Level Intermediate

1:55pm PDT

Observability for a Multi-Tenant GraphQL Gateway at Scale - Vickey Yeh, Airbnb

Wednesday May 20, 2026 1:55pm - 2:20pm PDT

Grand Ballroom I

Viaduct, Airbnb's unified data access layer, hosts over 1.5M lines of application code from 500+ tenants, with 200+ changes merged daily—all operating as a single service. At this scale, enabling teams to independently monitor and troubleshoot their code is essential. This talk describes how we approach observability with multitenancy at the core: - Establishing clear ownership of modules and...
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Speakers

Vickey Yeh

Senior Software Engineer, Airbnb

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

observability multi tenant graphql at scale pdf

Wednesday May 20, 2026 1:55pm - 2:20pm PDT
Grand Ballroom I

Observability + Telemetry + Tracing

Audience Level Any
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

1:55pm PDT

Grafast: A Declarative Solution To GraphQL's Execution Woes - Benjie Gillam, Graphile

Wednesday May 20, 2026 1:55pm - 2:20pm PDT

Boardroom

A new approach to GraphQL execution, enabling engineers to build next-level efficiency into new or existing GraphQL APIs. This declarative approach to execution eliminates the many pitfalls of traditional resolvers and optimizes communications with your business logic. This is achieved through understanding the request's full data requirements and planning the best batched execution strategy...
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Speakers

Benjie Gillam

Maintainer, Graphile

Wednesday May 20, 2026 1:55pm - 2:20pm PDT
Boardroom

Servers

Audience Level Intermediate

2:30pm PDT

CANCELLED: Governing the AI-Graph: Observability and Security for LLM-Generated Queries - Rajeshwari Sah, Apple Inc

Wednesday May 20, 2026 2:30pm - 2:55pm PDT

Grand Ballroom I

When we give AI agents access to our GraphQL APIs, we introduce a new class of distributed system challenges: non-deterministic queries, potential N+1 floods, and authorization bypasses. How do we ensure our "AI-generated" queries are safe and efficient? This talk bridges the gap between AI Quality Engineering and GraphQL governance. Building on my work designing evaluation frameworks for...
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Wednesday May 20, 2026 2:30pm - 2:55pm PDT
Grand Ballroom I

AI and LLMs

Audience Level Intermediate

2:30pm PDT

Sharding a GraphQL Gateway for Blast Radius Reduction - Linquan Zhang & Cetin Sahin, Airbnb

Wednesday May 20, 2026 2:30pm - 2:55pm PDT

Boardroom

At Airbnb, our GraphQL gateway is a multi-tenant serverless platform hosting 500+ tenants and 1.5M+ lines of application code. Like many large GraphQL systems, it operated as a "shared fate" architecture. To mitigate this risk, we embarked on a multi-year journey to implement traffic sharding at different levels of sophistication. We started with shuffle sharding to reduce the blast radius of any...
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Speakers

Linquan Zhang

Individual Contributor, Airbnb

I work on Viaduct, Airbnb's GraphQL-based system that provides a unified interface for accessing and interacting with any data source at Airbnb.

Cetin Sahin

Staff Software Engineer, Airbnb

Cetin works on Viaduct, Airbnb’s multi-tenant GraphQL platform that provides a unified interface for accessing and interacting with any data source at Airbnb. His work centers on reliability, performance, and observability at scale.

Sharding a GraphQL Gateway for Blast Radius Reduction pdf

Wednesday May 20, 2026 2:30pm - 2:55pm PDT
Boardroom

Servers

Audience Level Any
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

2:30pm PDT

The Easy Way and the Hard Way: Blue-green GraphQL Deployments - Zack Warnimont, Apollo

Wednesday May 20, 2026 2:30pm - 2:55pm PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

Blue-green and canary deploys are table stakes for application code, but they’re surprisingly hard to get right for GraphQL. Routers often just “pull latest” schema, rollbacks mean republishing and recomposing, and it’s nearly impossible to answer a basic incident question: “What schema was this request actually hitting?”. After testing in a staging environment and deploying to...
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Speakers

Zack Warnimont

Software Engineer, Apollo

Zack is a Software Engineer currently working at Apollo. He has worked for companies small and large over the last 10 years, with an emphasis on deployment safety and development efficiency.

In his free time, Zack enjoys playing piano and spending time with his family. Ask him anything about music... Read More →

graphqlconf 2026 05 zack warnimont no paging pdf

Wednesday May 20, 2026 2:30pm - 2:55pm PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

Tooling + DX + Testing + Documentation

Audience Level Intermediate
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

3:05pm PDT

GraphQL Data Mocking at Scale With LLMs and @generateMock - Michael Rebello, Airbnb

Wednesday May 20, 2026 3:05pm - 3:30pm PDT

Boardroom

Producing valid and realistic mock data for prototyping and testing has been an unsolved challenge for years. Mock data is tedious to write and maintain, but attempts to improve the process such as random value generation and field stubbing fall short as they lack essential domain context to make test data realistic and meaningful. In this talk, I’ll share how we’ve reimagined GraphQL mocking...
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Speakers

Michael Rebello

Staff Engineer, Airbnb

Michael is a Staff Engineer at Airbnb focusing on GraphQL clients, with >10 years of tech experience. Previously, he spent 6 years at Lyft as Staff Engineer leading mobile networking, building the rider app, and contributing to their engineering blog. He's spoken at conferences globally... Read More →

GraphQL Data Mocking at Scale with LLMs and generateMock pdf

Wednesday May 20, 2026 3:05pm - 3:30pm PDT
Boardroom

AI and LLMs

Audience Level Any
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

3:05pm PDT

Building MCP Apps With GraphQL Patterns You Already Know - Jerel Miller, Apollo GraphQL

Wednesday May 20, 2026 3:05pm - 3:30pm PDT

Grand Ballroom I

You know how to build client apps—but where do client developers fit in the new world of ChatGPT and MCP? If you've used GraphQL before, it turns out your knowledge translates directly. This talk demonstrates how to build MCP apps using Apollo's AI apps client and MCP server with patterns you already use: 1. Fragment colocation → Tool design: Structure MCP tools like component data...
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Speakers

Jerel Miller

Sr. Staff Software Engineer, Apollo GraphQL

Jerel is a Colorado native with a brief stint in Portland Oregon. He loves to code and learn about all sorts of programming patterns. He is an avid Denver Broncos fan and loves to play the bass.

GraphQL Conf 2026 Jerel pdf

Wednesday May 20, 2026 3:05pm - 3:30pm PDT
Grand Ballroom I

Clients

Audience Level Intermediate
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

3:05pm PDT

The State of GraphQL Federation - Michael Staib, ChilliCream

Wednesday May 20, 2026 3:05pm - 3:30pm PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

The GraphQL community has come together to standardize how distributed systems can be built with GraphQL as an orchestrator. In this talk, I will outline our vision for GraphQL as an orchestration layer and explain how the emerging Composite Schema specification addresses the challenges of composing distributed graphs. We’ll review the progress made since the last GraphQLConf within the...
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Speakers

Michael Staib

CEO, ChilliCream

Wednesday May 20, 2026 3:05pm - 3:30pm PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

Federation + Distributed Systems

Audience Level Intermediate

3:30pm PDT

Break

Wednesday May 20, 2026 3:30pm - 3:50pm PDT

Foyer

Wednesday May 20, 2026 3:30pm - 3:50pm PDT
Foyer

Breaks + Networking + Special Events

3:50pm PDT

Changing the Game for Trusted Documents — What If Your Whole Platform Natively Supported It? - Laurin Quast & Denis Badurina, The Guild

Wednesday May 20, 2026 3:50pm - 4:15pm PDT

Boardroom

Trusted documents (persisted queries) are one of the most powerful tools in the GraphQL security and performance toolkit. By restricting your API to only pre-approved operations, you eliminate entire classes of attacks, reduce payload sizes, and gain full visibility into client behavior. Yet most struggle to adopt them – the tooling is fragmented, the workflow is manual, and the deployment story...
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Speakers

Denis Badurina

Denis from The Guild, The Guild

Laurin Quast

Developer, The Guild

Wednesday May 20, 2026 3:50pm - 4:15pm PDT
Boardroom

Clients

Audience Level Any

3:50pm PDT

Brute Force Correctness - James Bellenger, Airbnb

Wednesday May 20, 2026 3:50pm - 4:15pm PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

So you’re a maintainer of a GraphQL system. Whether it’s a federation gateway, a complex client library, or a custom executor—how do you know that it’s capital-C Correct? Your tests are decent, and they seem to pass, but what about the test cases that you didn’t think of? Did you remember to handle @skip directives on fragment spreads? What about when those directives use variables? Or...
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Speakers

James Bellenger

Engineer, Airbnb

Running and baking enthusiast.

Brute Force Correctness selected stills pdf

Wednesday May 20, 2026 3:50pm - 4:15pm PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

Tooling + DX + Testing + Documentation

Audience Level Intermediate
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

3:50pm PDT

Speed Without Sacrifice: How Wayfair Transforms DevEx With AI and MCP - Maheswari Karlapudi & Muskan Sethi, Wayfair

Wednesday May 20, 2026 3:50pm - 4:15pm PDT

Grand Ballroom I

Wayfair is embedding AI and MCP into every stage of the developer workflow to unlock speed without compromising quality. From Schema Copilot (inline reviews) to AI Mocking (intelligent test data generation) to AI-Assisted Schema Documentation (auditing and auto-generating descriptions across 200+ subgraphs), these purpose-built tools streamline workflows, reduce friction, and scale engineering...
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Speakers

Maheswari Karlapudi

Software Engineer, Wayfair

Maheswari is a Software Engineer on the GraphQL Platforms team at Wayfair, providing a stable and resilient gateway for e-commerce data. Her work focuses on platform reliability and performance, while crafting the tooling necessary to accelerate the developer lifecycle across Way... Read More →

Muskan Kaur Sethi

Software Engineer, Wayfair

Muskan is a Software Engineer on Wayfair’s GraphQL Platforms team, where she develops reliable and scalable infrastructure to support e-commerce data access. Her work centers on improving platform performance and stability, as well as building developer tools that streamline workflows... Read More →

Accelerating the GraphQL Lifecycle pdf

Wednesday May 20, 2026 3:50pm - 4:15pm PDT
Grand Ballroom I

Tooling + DX + Testing + Documentation

Audience Level Intermediate
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

4:25pm PDT

Lightning Talk: DoS Wars: Revenge of the Fragments - Sachin Shinde, Apollo GraphQL

Wednesday May 20, 2026 4:25pm - 4:35pm PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

Fragments—an indispensable tool for modularizing data requirements alongside client code, but also a denial-of-service attack vector for servers. Security guides will tell you to mitigate by validating queries and performing cost analysis, usually via field costs and list sizes. However, this focus on field execution can distract from how fragments affect the rest of the server stack. In this...
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Speakers

Sachin Shinde

Staff Software Engineer, Apollo GraphQL

Working on all things federation and orchestration at Apollo, previously worked on the Apollo Studio schema and metrics pipelines.

DoS Wars Revenge of the Fragments pdf

Wednesday May 20, 2026 4:25pm - 4:35pm PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

Security

Audience Level Any
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

4:25pm PDT

@live GraphQL in Practice: Postgres-to-React Realtime Data Sync - Tobbe Lundberg, Cedar Software AB

Wednesday May 20, 2026 4:25pm - 4:50pm PDT

Grand Ballroom I

We built a real-time system for Postgres→React sync using a `LISTEN/NOTIFY` Postgres trigger, GraphQL `@live` queries, a React hook and a custom ORM-inspired GraphQL query builder. Starting from ESP32 microcontroller devices sending MQTT messages and a Node/Postgres backend, we moved from polling to a stand-alone PoC with Yoga, Prisma triggers, and a custom `useLiveQuery` hook. After proving...
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Speakers

Tobbe Lundberg

-, Cedar Software AB

Tech Lead at Aerafarms. Maintainer of CedarJS. Lives out in the middle-of-nowhere in Sweden. Likes everything on two wheels and loves to travel.

Wednesday May 20, 2026 4:25pm - 4:50pm PDT
Grand Ballroom I

Production Insights - Regular Scale

Audience Level Beginner

4:25pm PDT

Turning San Francisco Into a GraphQL Server - Jean Lucas Lima, ConfrariaTech

Wednesday May 20, 2026 4:25pm - 4:50pm PDT

Boardroom

What if a city could run as a GraphQL server? In this talk, we model San Francisco as a modular GraphQL runtime powered by Viaduct. Instead of stitching together microservices or configuring external gateways, we organize zoning, building permits, transit, and census data as domain modules inside a single distributed graph engine. Using real public datasets from the City of San Francisco and the...
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Speakers

Jean Lucas Lima

Founder, ConfrariaTech

Jean Lucas is a Developer Advocate focused on distributed systems and GraphQL runtime architecture. He works on making complex graph platforms like Viaduct approachable through clear abstractions and open-source examples. Based in Brazil, he also founded ConfrariaTech, a community... Read More →

Wednesday May 20, 2026 4:25pm - 4:50pm PDT
Boardroom

Servers

Audience Level Beginner

4:40pm PDT

Sponsored Lightning Talk: Search and Execute with Code Mode Backed by the Graph - Jens Neuse & Ahmet Soormally, Wundergraph

Wednesday May 20, 2026 4:40pm - 4:50pm PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

Speakers

Ahmet Soormally

Principal Engineer, Wundergraph

Ahmet Soormally is a Principal Engineer at WunderGraph, where he helps organizations build and scale modern graph platforms. His work focuses on graph consumption across multiple protocols - including GraphQL, REST, gRPC, Connect, and MCP for AI agents - helping teams design APIs... Read More →

Jens Neuse

Jens Neuse (CEO WunderGraph), WunderGraph

Wednesday May 20, 2026 4:40pm - 4:50pm PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

Federation + Distributed Systems

Audience Level Any

5:00pm PDT

Keynote: GraphQL’s Next Chapter: Progress, Proposals, and Participation - Pascal Senn, COO, Chillicream & Mark Larah, Group Tech Lead, Yelp

Wednesday May 20, 2026 5:00pm - 5:20pm PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

GraphQL has always been a community driven project. In this closing keynote, we will look at what the GraphQL Working Groups have been building and the progress made across the specification and ecosystem. We will also highlight the GraphQL GAP proposal and explore how it can open new opportunities for collaboration. Join us as we reflect on how far GraphQL has come and how the community can help...
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Speakers

Pascal Senn

COO, ChilliCream

Mark Larah

Group Tech Lead, Yelp

Wednesday May 20, 2026 5:00pm - 5:20pm PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

Keynote Sessions

Audience Level Any

5:20pm PDT

Keynote: Closing Remarks - Lee Byron, Co-Creator of GraphQL and Director, GraphQL Foundation

Wednesday May 20, 2026 5:20pm - 5:30pm PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

Speakers

Lee Byron

Co-creator of GraphQL and Director, GraphQL Foundation

Wednesday May 20, 2026 5:20pm - 5:30pm PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

Keynote Sessions

Audience Level Any

9:30am PDT

WG Day [Invite Only; Pre-Registration Required]

Thursday May 21, 2026 9:30am - 4:30pm PDT

Meta FRE 117, Fremont

A day for GraphQL working group members and maintainers of key GraphQL open source software to socialize, strategize, and build on the momentum of the main conference. Capacity is limited, so invitations will go to regular working group participants first. Additional attendees can join via a waitlist, with priority for maintainers of GraphQL-related open source software (clients, servers,...
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Thursday May 21, 2026 9:30am - 4:30pm PDT
Meta FRE 117, Fremont

WG Day