DEV Milan has started, and it was awesome!

On Monday 23rd September we kicked off the first event of the DEV Community Milanese chapter, and it was a blast! 🇮🇹

We as Mikamai have fostered and helped to gather many tech communities in Milan over the course of the years, and it with great pleasure that we organized this one ourselves to thank all these awesome people and their daily effort in bringing Italian developers together.

We hosted two talks (actually one big talk divided into two sections) exploring the magical world of GraphQL APIs first on the backend side, and then on the frontend.

The Mighty Backend

I started the evening with the backend talk, introducing new people to what GraphQL is and isn't and quickly explaining the inner working of the language, then moved on to more practical advices and strategies for implementing clean and effective GraphQL APIs.

We touched topics like types and scalars, datasources, batch loading and evolving schemas, and tried to give actionable suggestions on how to cleanly and efficiently tackle all these issues.

Participants were very active and asked clever questions that made the whole experience much more inclusive and enjoyable!

When in Italy, just pizza 🍕

After the first talk, it's time for a break! We offered pizzas, chips and beverage to all attendees and had a fun time networking, discussing and generally have a good time. It was really fun and I'm very proud of how the evening turned out.

The Glorious Frontend

Then it was time for the second half of the event. My colleague Mattia Panzeri, one of our finest frontend engineers, talked about the challenges of modern frontend development, from multiple devices and screen resolutions to finicky mobile networks and voice assistants, and how GraphQL help clients tailor API requests exactly to their needs. He provided examples of similar and related technologies like Netflix Falcor and why they failed to achieve what GraphQL does.

All of this explained with his witty and funny style that made the whole speech very lighthearted and enjoyable.

We close the evening with a live demonstration using GitLab's GraphQL Explorer to showcase how queries work in the wild, and of course, this being a live demo it went horribly wrong with authentication problems and the window manager of my laptop ultimately deciding that it didn't like our projector so much, but all in all we had good fun.

We gave out stickers to everyone and announced a followup of this event, that we absolutely want to make again and possibly on a regular basis. We are thinking one per month or every two months, depending on speakers' availability.

I really want to thank the DEV Team for launching IRL and supporting this kind of initiatives. There is still work to be done on the logistic side of things, but in the end, the event was a success and everyone enjoyed it.

Thank you for reading and I hope to see you next time!

You can find the slides here.