[Ingim’Up] : Back to the GraphQL training !

Last December INGIMA was pleased to welcome Greg, a Javascript trainer and co-founder of Smooth Code. As part of a partnership with our in-house INGIM’ UP training program, Smoothcode has boosted our team of developers on GraphQL, a query language developed in-house by Facebook in 2012.

Our Ingimates, especially the members of our integrated digital agency TOTEM, have been able to benefit from this increase in competence in order to stay at the cutting edge of technology.

This training was a learning experience:

To switch from REST mode to Graph QL
The advantages and limitations of this model

Hello Greg, can you introduce yourself and your background?

My name is Greg, I’m 28 years old, I started development in junior high school at the age of 15.

I started by selling websites and then joined a computer science school which allowed me to join as an intern a team of LeMonde. fr newspaper where I stayed for 4 years to finish Lead Developer. I started with PHP to quickly switch to JavaScript.

After this experience I had the chance to join the founding team of Doctolib. The whole REACT stack was set up there. I stayed there for 2 years and finally started freelancing to give trainings. It made me want to do more, full-time. I met Jeremy, my current associate, and founded Smooth Code with him.

 

Awesome! And what does “Smooth Code” mean?

We offer JavaScript training courses only. On REACT in particular and GraphQL. Most of the time we organise sessions on our premises, but we can also intervene outside our offices in different formats, as we do today at INGIMA.

 

What is today’s agenda?

GraphQL, rather the server part. We will create an API in GraphQL, discover the best practices, how to do it, etc. We will focus more on the server part, which is the creation of the API.

 

Who is the training for?

Developers who want to train themselves on a technology in order to be able to intervene at a customer’s site, on a project, to be more versatile. But also curious people, who have heard about it and want to discover the technology.

In fact, training is a time saving: one day of training is the equivalent of 7 days of self-training. In addition, saving time on good practices means avoiding mistakes.

What tools do you use to deliver these trainings?

It’s a fairly classic format for presentation: Keynote but also Powerpoint for the support part but there are also exercises in “red thread”: we start from an empty project, and little by little we embellish it until arriving at a nice thing.

After 4 weeks of training, we were able to collect the feedback from Erwan, full Stack Javascript developer of the TOTEM agency, who was delighted with his experience and is ready to take further training with INGIM’ UP:

What do you like about GraphQL?

First of all, it’s a fairly recent and technical subject, which I already know quite a bit about. But I wanted to go deeper into it. This was an opportunity for the entire ToTEM digital agency to get down to business, because we believe it is important to keep up to date with the latest technologies.
Then, what I like about GraphQL is that it allows more results for much less effort, the dream! It is intended to replace traditional APIs. It’s efficient, it simply works.

How does this training help you or will it help you in the future?

I understood that this will help me in any type of application, web or mobile: simpler to implement, maintenance is also easier, it is a considerable time saving. With ToTEM we have already started using GraphQL on behalf of our SODEXO client: we develop the Web and Mobile application, and all communications are in GraphQL. I took care of the Front End part while Gislain (NDRL: FullStack Javascript developer at ToTEM) was in charge of coding the whole Back End part. So we are already in the concrete with GraphQL.

To sum up in a few words, why would you recommend GraphQL?

Less time to create and maintain, less cost over the long term, less effort, and all for more results.