Welcome back to "90 Day of Tutorials". I'm trying to make up the lost time from earlier this month, so two posts today. We'll pretend it's a different day though, for counting purposes. Now I'm playing with GraphQL, because that's another popular API style. I've done plenty of REST recently; time to switch it up! (Perhaps I'll finally get around to gRPC and tRPC after this!?)
In particular I'm looking at the Apollo platform. They seem to be one of the leaders in this space, so I thought I'd give it a try. In particular they have a pretty nice LMS, and I thought I'd start with their introductory course, the first of a four-part series.
Overall a very smooth experience. Similar to the course from TotalTypescript, there is a video to kick things off, and a bunch of exercises. But where the approaches diverge is that Apollo holds my hand. It tells me exactly what to do. At the end I get a finished application.
I'm not sure how I feel about this. I really liked Matt's approach to learning Zod and Typescript. We'll see if the concepts stick around in my head as well with Apollo. Of course it would certainly be possible to shove this GraphQL stuff into a Stackblitz instance and reproduce the experience from TotalTypescript. And Apollo certainly has the money for something like this.
But, that being said, it's basically exactly the same as many of the other tutorials: follow the steps, get a simple app. Another small quip, however: we're building some ridiculous cat/astronaut app. I'm not sure what the point is; perhaps they're trying to be novel or quirky or something. I guess that's fine, but when I'm learning a new technology, I don't want to have to learn a new functional area. Please keep everything the same for the getting started tutorials. Just do a todo list or a blog management system!
Overall, the experience was so smooth that I'm definitely going to continue with the next three parts. Great job Apollo! (Perhaps the cats did draw me in!?)