Day 1 · GraphQL Fundamentals, APIs & Clients

Welcome! We're really glad you're here. This repo holds everything for Day 1: lessons, labs, and runnable projects. Day 2 (federation, security & production readiness) lives in its own repo.

Instructor Info

• Eve Porcello: Twitter | Email
• Moon Highway Training: Website | Mailing List

🖥️ Slides

• Course intro slides

⚙️ Setup

The morning is 100% browser-based - you need nothing installed. For the afternoon:

1. Node 20+ (node --version) - Apollo Server 5 requires it
2. VS Code or IntelliJ with a GraphQL extension (nice to have)
3. Clone this repo. Each project folder in projects/ installs independently with npm install (for snowtooth-api and snowtooth-ui, run it inside start/ or complete/).

🗺️ The day

Morning · The query language & schemas (browser only)

#	Lesson	Lab	Playground
01	What is GraphQL?	-	-
02	The GraphQL Query Language	Query Lab	Snowtooth · Pet Library
03	Effective Schema Design	Schema Lab	Apollo Sandbox

Afternoon · Building APIs & clients (local)

#	Lesson	Lab	Project
04	Apollo Server Basics & Mocking	-	snowtooth-api
05	Resolvers, Context & Data Sources	API Lab	snowtooth-api · pokemon-rest-wrapper
06	GraphQL Clients & Apollo Client	Client Lab	snowtooth-ui

📦 The projects

Project	What it is	Run
projects/snowtooth-api	Ski resort GraphQL API - Apollo Server 5. start/ = mocked server, complete/ = real resolvers	npm start (in start/ or complete/)
projects/pet-library-schema	Schema-design lab (SDL only) + complete solution	no server needed
projects/pokemon-rest-wrapper	GraphQL layer over the REST PokéAPI	npm start
projects/snowtooth-ui	Next.js + React 19 + Apollo Client 4 lift-status board. start/ = placeholder, complete/ = finished app	npm run dev (in start/ or complete/)

🔗 Reference links

Query language & schemas

• GitHub GraphQL Explorer - a huge real-world graph to explore
• GraphQL Spec
• Schema Cheatsheet
• Relay Connection Spec (cursor pagination)

Apollo docs

• Apollo Server (we use v5)
• Migrating from older Apollo Server versions - useful when reading old tutorials
• Mocking
• Fetching from REST
• Apollo Client (React) (we use v4)
• Apollo Client + Next.js integration

Versions used in this course

Package	Version	Notes
@apollo/server	^5	Node 20+, graphql ≥ 16.11
@apollo/client	^4	React hooks from @apollo/client/react
graphql	^16.11	v17 is still pre-release - don't use it yet

See you tomorrow for Day 2: Federation, Security & Production Readiness! 🚀