This evening masterclass covers the decisions that separate APIs people love to work with from APIs that generate three-hour debugging sessions. We spend the first hour on REST done right - resource modelling, HTTP semantics, pagination patterns, and versioning - then move into GraphQL for the second hour and close with a 30-minute live schema review using queries submitted by attendees before the event.

Topics covered

• REST: resource naming, HTTP methods and status codes, HATEOAS (and when to ignore it), cursor vs offset pagination
• GraphQL schema design: naming conventions, nullable vs non-nullable fields, input types vs arguments
• The N+1 problem: DataLoader, batching strategies, and when to denormalise in the schema
• GraphQL subscriptions and real-time patterns: WebSocket vs SSE in practice
• Schema federation with Apollo Federation v2: composing multiple subgraphs
• Persisted queries, field deprecation, and the breaking-change conversation with frontend teams
• Security: depth limiting, complexity analysis, and introspection in production

Bring a laptop if you want to follow along with the live examples. The schema review section is interactive - submit your worst API endpoint before the event and we will look at it together.