Elixir, Phoenix, Absinthe, GraphQL, React, and Apollo: an absurdly deep dive

ARANK

If you’re anything like me, at least 3 or 4 of the keywords in the title of this article fall under the category of “things I’ve been wanting to play with but haven’t gotten around to it yet.” React is the exception; I use it almost every day at work and know it front and back. I used Elixir for a project a couple of years ago, but it’s been a while and I’ve never used it in the context of GraphQL. Similarly, I’ve done a small amount of work on a project that used GraphQL with a Node.js backend and Relay on the frontend, but I barely scratched the surface of GraphQL and I’ve never used Apollo. I firmly believe that the best way to truly learn a technology is to build something with it, so I decided to take a deep dive and build a web application with all of these technologies together. If you want to skip to the end, the code is on GitHub and there’s a live demo here. (The live demo is running on a free-tier Heroku dyno, so it might take 30 seconds or so to wake up when you …