[RECAP] Let’s Launch: Apollo Community Meetups, Reimagined!
Meeting Date: Wednesday, April 16, 2025
Featured Speaker: @Dan_Boerner Apollo Graph Champion
THIS WEEK’S TOPIC
This week we kicked off the newly reimagined Apollo Community Meetup Series—a bi-weekly gathering built for the community, with the community. Formerly known as Champions Meetups, this new series offers a welcoming, safe space to connect, learn, and collaborate with developers, architects, and API enthusiasts from around the world.
In this special launch edition, we were joined by a couple dozen Apollo community thought leaders who’ve been working behind the scenes to help evolve our community spaces and curate compelling content for the months ahead.
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MEETING RESOURCES
Here are some resources that were shared during the talk:
Initial Recap: Today’s Community Meetup (about… Meetups!)
Missed today’s session? No worries—a full recap with summary, recording, transcript, and survey results will be shared by the end of the week.
Discussion Highlights
1. Reimagining Meetups
Despite a Zoom outage, 15 community members (many of them @OG_Champion) gathered to talk about the future of our community meetups. We explored ideal topics, formats, meeting times, and the deeper question: what makes these valuable to you?
2. Meetup Survey
Attendees filled out this short survey to share their preferences. It’s still open—please take a minute to add your voice! Survey results will be included in the full recap.
3. Micro Topic: Computed Fields
@andywgarcia surfaced a great question that reminded me of this forum post by @dpchamps about managing computed fields across subgraphs with @requires. @stephen (Netflix) offered a 
spicy take—would graph life would be simpler without the implicit power of @requires? That kicked off a thoughtful discussion on when to lean into powerful federation features versus letting services handle computation outside the graph. Which sparked @Joey to re-raise a question he’s been dealing with at Paypal – subgraphs as services.
4. Micro Topic: Subgraphs as Services
@Joey posed What if a service has no non-graph clients – can it just be a subgraph? This led to a lively discussion on using subgraphs as standalone domain services and the potential risks of direct subgraph-to-subgraph dependencies. @stephen shared a practical answer that might surprise you.
Want to hear how these convos wrapped up—and what leaders from some of the world’s largest production graphs had to say? Stay tuned for the full recap, and join us at the next one.
Apollo Community Meetup - AI Agents Meet the Graph: Exploring the Model Context Protocol - #2.
Will @stephen show us how he vibe-coded GitHub - fotoetienne/gqai: Turn any GraphQL endpoint into a set of MCP tools or will @Joey share the latest on MCP server? Find out!
~Dan, Apollo Champion
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