GraphQLConf 2026 Wrap-up
GraphQLConf 2026 has come and gone, and what a conference it was! Two days of talks, demos, and hallway conversations at the DoubleTree by Hilton in Fremont, CA reminded everyone why this community is so special. We wish to send a heartfelt thank you to our Platinum sponsor, Meta; our Gold Sponsors, The Guild and WunderGraph; our Silver sponsors, Apollo GraphQL and ChilliCream; our Open Source Community Sponsor, Airbnb; and our Bronze sponsor, Grafast. Their support made this event possible! We extend that gratitude to our speakers, who brought their best ideas and hard-won production wisdom to the stage; and to every attendee who traveled, tuned in, and showed up with curiosity and enthusiasm. GraphQL is what it is because of all of you.
Keynotes: “GraphQL can and must be the language of AI.”
Bookended by opening and closing remarks from Lee Byron, co-creator of GraphQL and Executive Director of the GraphQL Foundation, the keynote program told a coherent story about where GraphQL stands and where it’s headed.
Uri Goldshtein of The Guild opened the day with a keynote on federation patterns seen in the wild. The framing was revealing: federation is no longer a frontier experiment — it’s a set of well-worn paths that teams across the industry are navigating with increasing confidence. He spoke about how GraphQL, in its maturity, was becoming boring in the best possible way.
Elena Bukareva and Braxton Bragg from Meta followed with what may have been the most memorable talk of the conference: “The Creator’s Curse: Why Meta Is Re-inventing GraphQL.” In 2015, Meta promised GraphQL would be “easy to learn and use.” Ten years and hundreds of billions of daily API calls later, not all of those promises survived contact with thousands of engineers. The keynote was a rare, candid look behind the curtain — which assumptions didn’t hold, which complexity traps emerged, and what’s now driving a new wave of reinvention at GraphQL’s birthplace.
Benjie Gillam of Graphile and Kewei Qu of Meta closed the opening day’s keynote block with “Creating a Golden Path for GraphQL.” The argument: GraphQL’s precise specification has delivered incredible interoperability and a rich ecosystem — but it hasn’t guaranteed that every adopter has a great experience. Some leave disillusioned by performance pitfalls, security concerns, and complexity that wasn’t visible at the outset. The talk was a call to action for the community to be more intentional about making the right path also the easy path.
Matt DeBergalis, CEO and Co-Founder of Apollo GraphQL, delivered a status report on a prediction made a year ago: that GraphQL would become foundational infrastructure for AI-driven applications. That prediction has come true. GraphQL is now powering critical AI initiatives at household brands across retail, hospitality, healthcare, and more. His thesis for the coming years: GraphQL’s declarative, entity-based architecture is an ideal match for agentic systems, where agents need to reason about typed, structured data rather than ad-hoc REST responses. “GraphQL can and must be the language of AI.”
On day two, Kewei Qu, Pascal Senn of ChilliCream, and Mark Larah of Yelp delivered the closing keynote: “GraphQL’s Next Chapter: Progress, Proposals, and Participation.” They reviewed working group progress on the specification and ecosystem, highlighted the new GraphQL Auxiliary Proposals (GAPs) initiative as a home for community-written specifications, and reflected on how far the community has come — and how it can continue to shape what comes next.
Sessions
Keynotes
AI and LLMs
Clients
Federation + Distributed Systems
Observability + Telemetry + Tracing
Performance
Production Insights
Schema Design + Evolution + Governance
Security
Servers
Tooling, DX, Testing + Documentation
The GraphQL All Hands Meeting on day two gave attendees a direct forum with the GraphQL Foundation and core maintainers. The feedback was consistent with what we’ve heard in prior years and rings just as true: the community wants more content: more tutorials, more production case studies, more educational material that meets developers where they are. There was also notable enthusiasm for GraphQL Locals, the initiative to support locally-organized GraphQL meetups around the world. Several new organizers stepped up at the conference, and the pipeline of upcoming local events looks strong heading into the second half of 2026. The Ambassadors program and the Community Working Group both continue to grow. The spring 2026 cohort made their presence felt at the conference, and conversations are already underway about expanding the program.
What’s next
Session recordings will be available on the GraphQL Foundation YouTube channel. For upcoming events, working group meetings, and GraphQL Locals events near you, visit calendar.graphql.org.