Hey there!
Work and GraphQL
My name is Michael Watson and I’m Head of DevRel at Apollo. I’ve been at Apollo for ~7 years now and I’ve worked with 100s of teams on their GraphQL deployments. I started as the first technical customer facing employee when Apollo was pivoting from Meteor. I was fortunate to work with all of Apollo’s customers before Apollo Federation launched along with contributing customer feedback into what created Apollo Federation. I was involved in many of the early deployments of Federation and consider myself a schema design specialist. So if you have any questions about schema design, I’m happy to try and help!
Fun Stuff
I do a lot of wood working and play basketball/golf in my free time. I’m a father with two kids and I absolutely have loved this new chapter (which I started after being at Apollo for a couple years). I love video games, but I don’t have much time for them. I’m a big fallout fan and Cyberpunk 2077/Starfield were my most recent games (haven’t touched in months ). I just got my son a Modretro chromatic gameboy and super proud that he beat my challenge of getting 20 lines in tetris, so he just got his second game - Batman!
Optional Challenge
I don’t have any background in coding other than learning on the job - no official schooling. I was a Mechanical Engineer and before I started my first tech job at Xamarin with cross-platform C# mobile development, I worked in biotech at Genentech on the equipment side of things. The last crazy thing I did at Genentech was being dropped inside of a 3 story processing tank to perform validation cleaning tests as required by the FDA.
I’m here to help anyone with anything GraphQL, API orchestration or Apollo. Feel free to reach out to me in this community and I’ll do my best to help. If you have any ideas of content or live coding you would love to see, let me know!