GraphQL provides a very flexible, efficient way to retrieve data from your APIs. A few months ago, Yelp released its “Local Graph”: a GraphQL API that wraps our local data and makes it even easier to integrate with. We’ll cover what GraphQL is at a high-level, how we built it into our API, and what you need to be aware of as you build your GraphQL API.

This talk will introduce attendees to GraphQL and then dive into the intricacies of how we built the API. It’ll cover end-to-end the flow we provide to our developers and some of the specific considerations we took when making it a public API:

• solving the N+1 data retrieval problem and query planning
• restricting queries to be efficient and safe
• structuring models for optimal data retrieval

This talk will also cover some of the specifics of hooking GraphQL into a service-oriented architecture, how it’s built into our infrastructure, and the advantages you gain by having GraphQL interface with services.