The Guild is joining the GraphQL Foundation

We are happy to announce that The Guild has joined the GraphQL Foundation as an official member!

We are happy to join companies like Facebook, Twitter, AWS, Shopify, Apollo and others in order to help shape the future of GraphQL and the community.

It is not cheap to be a foundation member, but we feel there is a big need and that we have a lot to contribute for that important goal.

We feel that because of our unique structure, we can contribute in unique ways to the foundation.

We want to open the core foundation work for the community, making it easier for all of you to contribute and influence GraphQL’s future.

Here are the first things we are going to focus on, and we would love your help with them:

1. GraphQL.org

graphql.org is a very important website. It is important because it’s the first thing beginners would get to when starting with GraphQL. Making that first experience smooth and easy is crucial.

The graphql.org website is very good, but it hasn’t been updated for a couple of years now since the original creators finished with their current iteration.

There are no active maintainers and contributions are being completely blocked.

That leads to people getting stuck and following the resources and links into unmaintained tutorials and libraries.

We’ve decided to invest time and improve the website as much as we can!

Dipesh Wagle lead and @ardatan joined him and both have did some awesome work! Check out their PRs on the website, follow the discussions, let us know for any feedback or improvements you have and we would love your help if you want to contribute!

1. Upgrading graphql.org to Gatsby
2. Improving graphql.org code’s page

2. GraphQL.js

graphql-js is a powerful library that is engine behind many community libraries today.

Ever since it was originally created by Lee Byron, which has done an amazing work creating a library that is still so powerful and relevant, not a lot of major changes has happened.

That is a good thing, but with time came more needs for updates and improvements.

The current biggest improvement that is waiting is the TypeScript migration. It has been planned for a couple of years now but not a lot of progress has been made.

We are going to change that now. Please follow the issue, read throughout the discussion to see what was planned and what happened, and help us unlock the work and make real progress towards a full migration.

Roadmap to TypeScript Issue

This also holds back many other things like the great work that has been done on stream and defer (the current plan is to merge that into master only after that TS migration has been done).

We are actively working on it and now is the perfect time to join and help us with that effort. Reach out and let us know if you can help and how we could support you with anything you need.

Also, please join the new graphql-js working group sessions.

3. Community Forum

Today the GraphQL community is scattered across many different forums. That’s ok, but having a central place to talk about common issues can be good, because it means you won’t have to lock yourself into specific solutions in order to solve common problems. We believe there is importance of talking about shared best practices, no matter what tools and languages you use.

We also are to blame for that as we’ve created our own Discord channel. The reason is that the official GraphQL Slack wasn’t being promoted and that the history of the messages there was being deleted.

We want to merge our own popular forum into the official GraphQL forum and revive the discussions there and hope others would follow. For that we need to decide on the right solution. Please follow the relevant issue and share your thgouhts.

4. GraphQL’s General Growth in the Community

Everyone here is working on GraphQL because we think it’s a good idea :)

So we would love to see GraphQL grow and spread.

Currently, the foundation hasn’t been doing a lot of promotion and using it’s assets like that website, social accounts and things like that. One thing we believe could be valuable is a monthly newsletter from the foundation. But instead of inventing a new one, we thought it was a better idea to collaborate with the existing ones.

So we’ve reached out to Prisma, which owns the GraphQL Weekly newsletter and has been maintaining it for years and decided to partner with them to spread the fondation’s messages!

Summary

Our goals are to help open the doors for anyone who wants to be part of the community, learn and contribute!

Everything we wrote above is just the start, and we want to hear from you how we could improve the GraphQL community as a whole.

We hope that our work would help you acheive that, but we mostly want to hear from you - what are the things that stop you from contributing and influencing the community? Let us know and let’s change that together!