Welcome to The Weekly Wisdom
Edition #1 - 08 May 2025
Topic tags - Connectors odyssey
Stay in the loop: Subscribe to the About the Community > Weekly Wisdom category to get notified when new posts drop—no FOMO here.
Hey all! 
Michelle here from the Apollo Education team, where I build courses for Odyssey, our official learning platform.
I’m here to kick things off with a multi-part series to teach you the basics of Apollo Connectors: a powerful way to bring existing REST APIs into your graph, all through configuration in the schema.
This week’s learning: An easier way to orchestrate APIs
Chances are, your apps have hundreds of lines of code to:
- sequence API calls from a bunch of different sources
- wait on one response before having to pipe a piece over to another request
- navigate through and transform complex, nested data structures.
All of these tasks (and more!) play a role in the process of API orchestration. Orchestrating API calls efficiently is a constant challenge in app development; we typically handle it by writing a lot of procedural code.
There’s a better way! With Apollo Connectors, we define requests to our data source and map the responses to our GraphQL types - and all the work happens in the schema! We get to pick the exact fields we need and shape the data just the way we want it.
No more complex data-fetching code; just clean, declarative queries that anyone on our team can understand.
Want to go deeper?
We dive into this topic in the Odyssey tutorial “GraphQL meets REST with Apollo Connectors”. Start with lesson 1 to get an overview. You can also read more about how Matt DeBergalis, Apollo CTO, thinks about graph-based API orchestration in the blog.
Share your thoughts in the thread below 
What’s the biggest pain point you’ve faced when orchestrating multiple API calls?