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GraphQLConf 2026 has ended
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.
Venue: Boardroom clear filter
Tuesday, May 19
 

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 moving forward.
Speakers
avatar for Jordan Eldredge

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

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 LLMs can’t access it—”agent-friendly” is now table stakes.

In this talk, we'll discuss how our tools have adapted to expose agent-friendly interfaces, allowing agents to seamlessly interact with and utilize them for exploring the graph, building queries, designing schemas, and more.

Finally, how can we leverage the power of AI within the tools themselves? We’ll discuss techniques for superpowering GraphQL tooling via focussed agents with guardrails and feedback loops, increasing accuracy and trust.
Speakers
avatar for Stephen Spalding

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 →
avatar for Kavitha Srinivasan

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

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 per selection with a complete breadth of objects spanning the response. The napkin math is compelling—5 fields resolved across a list of 100 objects running depth-first will produce 500 resolver calls + lazy promises, while running breadth-first will only produce 5. We’ve seen dramatic results with some large list queries shaving many seconds off their end-to-end response times.

This talk will cover:

* Why depth-first has hidden costs that scale linearly.
* How breadth-first inverts the cost model.
* Why dataloaders are a hack.
* The trade-offs we accepted.
* How we're incrementally migrating to breadth execution.

If you've ever been concerned that CPU-bound GraphQL performance doesn't scale well, this talk offers a new perspective—and proof that challenging conventions can pay off.
Speakers
avatar for Greg MacWilliam

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

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 to outperform not just JSON, but WAP and protobufs too. We'll share the technical approach (implementing Argo), the results (27-50% smaller responses), and why this represents the next evolution in efficient data transfer for Meta's apps.
Speakers
avatar for Kevin Gorham

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

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 a practical guide to teaching yourself GraphQL in 2026. We’ll examine how beginners typically build their first mental model of GraphQL, the most common misconceptions, and the key design questions they encounter early. Special attention will be paid to different modalities: schema-first vs. code-first, schema design principles, common pitfalls when considering enums, the proper use of fragments, and security and performance by default.

Attendees will leave with a conceptual roadmap for self-study, a recipe book for context engineering in their agent, and an understanding of the major decision points along the journey ahead.
Speakers
avatar for Jeff Auriemma

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

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 alternative: client-side resolvers. With Relay Resolvers, clients can define fields that combine and transform data locally. We'll walk through how they work and guidance for deciding when logic belongs on the server versus the client.
Speakers
avatar for Janette Cheng

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

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 and which ones might not, especially if you are running GraphQL at scale. In this lightning talk we will explore possible options for making this whole process more safe in the present, and dip into how it could look in the future!
Speakers
avatar for Laurin Quast

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

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 for Embedded Governance to bridge engineering and enterprise risk. Learn how to transform your graph's technical "menu" into a transparent Data Marketplace with radical observability, ensuring built-in security and compliance.

Attendees will learn to:
- Navigate the Risk Primer: Translate GraphQL features (types, fields, directives) into risk language to build organizational trust.
- Shift Security Left: Automate security with secure frameworks & replacing manual reviews.
- Architect for Data Isolation: Use of fine grained access to manage entitlements and prevent unauthorized data exposure.
- Harden the Control Plane: Reduce attack surface using technical strategies like disabling introspection and enforcing persisted query ownership.
Speakers
avatar for Gaurav Singh

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 →
avatar for Sulbigar Shanawaz

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

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 learn how to decompose complex queries into atomic components, separating static fragments from dynamic ones within the same request to dramatically boost cache efficiency.

The Power of the Edge: We'll discuss the benefits of moving the "split-and-merge" logic to the Edge. We will explain how an intelligent Gateway can manage this complexity close to the user, saving expensive compute resources at the origin and reducing latency.

The Next Frontier: PQC meets @defer: To wrap up, we'll demonstrate how combining caching with the GraphQL @defer directive allows us to return cached fragments in milliseconds while streaming the remaining dynamic parts as they resolve.
Speakers
avatar for Uri Goldshtein

Uri Goldshtein

CEO, The Guild

Tuesday May 19, 2026 4:05pm - 4:30pm PDT
Boardroom
  Tooling + DX + Testing + Documentation

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 session covers critical
production considerations including query optimization strategies, caching layers, connection pooling, and event-driven architectures that power real-time notifications at scale. Attendees will learn how GraphQL simplifies data access across massive datasets while maintaining performance and reliability. We'll discuss scaling patterns, monitoring strategies, and lessons learned from operating GraphQL services that handle billions of daily operations across global marketplaces. This technical deep-dive is designed for engineers interested in understanding how to architect and operate GraphQL systems at huge scale, with practical insights from Amazon's production environments.
Speakers
avatar for Aishwarya Tirumala

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

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 talks about it. Until now.
And it's not even that complicated, just a couple of hashes and we're able to learn more about your data than you ever thought possible.
Speakers
avatar for Jens Neuse

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
 
Wednesday, May 20
 

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 releases across a massive device ecosystem. We’ll walk through the architecture that lets servers describe dynamic page structure and behavior, how those contracts scale across many product surfaces and experiments, and the performance and reliability lessons we learned operating this at Netflix scale. When we built this system, we found almost no public examples of similar patterns, so this session is intentionally practical: we’ll share concrete schema patterns, client rendering strategies, and tips you can apply to your own feeds, homepages, and highly dynamic experiences—whether you’re working at Netflix scale or just starting to stretch GraphQL beyond CRUD.
Speakers
avatar for Sreekanth Ramakrishnan

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

10:50am 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 explores the AI systems we're building on our existing GraphQL infrastructure:

In-store AI assistant (planned for Order Engine GraphQL BFF)
Mobile/web AI platform (exploring on Apollo Supergraph)
On-call automation using Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers
You'll learn how GraphQL reduces AI token costs by 75x, enables zero-configuration AI tool discovery, provides built-in guardrails through type systems, and why federation is the perfect architecture for enterprise AI agents. Real demos, proven patterns, lessons from building GraphQL at scale.
Speakers
avatar for Sharon Gorla

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

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 additional context.
So what if agents could interact with any GraphQL API in a generic, reliable way?
In this session, we'll look at the challenges of agentic interactions with GraphQL and how semantic introspection could unlock a new way for agents to navigate the schema and interact with GraphQL APIs more reliably.
Speakers
avatar for Pascal Senn

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

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, ensure correct and predictable types, and provide a smooth migration path from existing tools without sacrificing flexibility or safety.

We'll also dive into the story behind the change: a collaboration between Eddy (The Guild) and Igor (Yelp), sparked by a single question and shaped by open discussion across time zones. It’s a look at how community feedback, real-world constraints, and trust can drive the biggest evolution in Codegen’s history.
Speakers
avatar for Eddy Nguyen

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.
avatar for Igor Kusakov

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

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 before requesting anything from the business logic. This decoupling of data fetching from the GraphQL request shape results in fewer and more efficient operations against your backend services and data sources, eliminating both over- and under-fetching on the backend along with deduplication of redundant work, leading to reduced operational costs and delightful user experiences! A passion project of a founding GraphQL TSC member, this MIT-licensed open source technology has already been in production at a number of companies for over a year!
Speakers
avatar for Benjie Gillam

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

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 single bad operation. We then added targeted sharding to separate online from asynchronous traffic, to rapidly quarantine misbehaving operations, and to improve the signal-to-noise ratio for our automated canary analysis. Most recently, to mitigate the risk posed by tenants that are used by lots of operations (and thus could bring down lots of shards), we have been working on tenant-aware sharding that minimizes the blast radius of such tenants.

We will cover how we architected our sharding solution and how it improved our operational abilities. You will gain a clear understanding of how our implementation tradeoffs have fared over time, key production insights gathered since rollout, and strategies to evolve a GraphQL gateway towards greater isolation without fragmenting the API surface.
Speakers
avatar for Linquan Zhang

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.
avatar for Cetin Sahin

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

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 at Airbnb by combining existing GraphQL infrastructure, rich product and schema context, and LLMs to generate convincing, type-safe mock data simply by adding a directive (@generateMock) to a field or operation:
- How integrating LLMs that are highly contextualized by a schema, documentation, and UX design into existing GraphQL tools drives a leap forward in the speed and quality of mock data creation.
- How a directive-driven approach lets engineers generate production-like, schema-conformant mock data without writing code.
- How integrating generated mock data into the GraphQL client runtime can enable engineers to build and test clients before server implementation.
- How this strategy guarantees that generated mock data is correct, deterministic, and stays in-sync with the server schema.
Speakers
avatar for Michael Rebello

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

3:50pm 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 is an afterthought.

What if your entire platform natively supported trusted documents from end to end? In this talk, I’ll show what becomes possible when persisted queries are first-class citizens of your GraphQL platform – from registration and version through CI/CD validation to production deployment and rollback. But trusted documents aren’t just for GraphQL clients. I’ll explore how they unlock new capabilities: exposing GraphQL operations as simple REST endpoints, and even powering MCP tools for AI agents – all built on the same foundation of pre-approved, governed operations.

You’ll leave with a clear picture of what a complete trusted documents platform looks like and practical steps to get there.
Speakers
avatar for Denis Badurina

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 →
avatar for Laurin Quast

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 →
Wednesday May 20, 2026 3:50pm - 4:15pm PDT
Boardroom
  Clients
  • Audience Level Any

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 U.S. Census, we demonstrate how tenant modules compose into a unified schema, how execution is coordinated across domain boundaries, and how teams can evolve parts of the graph without central bottlenecks.

We introduce a lightweight Skills SDK that abstracts runtime configuration and enforces clear ownership rules, making modular graph design approachable.

Finally, we connect an AI client to the server to demonstrate structured, explainable reasoning over live city data.

All demo code and schema modules will be open sourced for attendees to explore and extend.
Speakers
avatar for Jean Lucas Lima

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
 
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  • Presentation Slides Attached
    Yes
  • Timezone

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Tuesday, May 19
Wednesday, May 20
Thursday, May 21
Boardroom
Foyer
Foyer + Bistro 880
Grand Ballroom I
Grand Ballroom II - IV
Meta FRE 117, Fremont
  • AI and LLMs
  • All Hands Meeting
  • Breaks + Networking + Special Events
  • Clients
  • Federation + Distributed Systems
  • Keynote Sessions
  • Observability + Telemetry + Tracing
  • Performance
  • Production Insights - Huge Scale
  • Production Insights - Regular Scale
  • Registration + Badge Pick-up
  • Schema Design + Evolution + Governance
  • Security
  • Servers
  • Solutions Showcase
  • Tooling + DX + Testing + Documentation
  • WG Day
  • Audience Level
  • Advanced
  • Any
  • Beginer
  • Beginner
  • Intermediate
  • Presentation Slides Attached
  • Yes