Week Four at Twintag: Upgrading the GraphQL API for a More Scalable Future Week four was all about performance, scalability, and stepping into a more backend-heavy role. After spending the last two weeks focusing on Angular and UI enhancements, this week I shifted gears to work on Twintag’s GraphQL API upgrade—something that will play a crucial role in making the platform faster and more efficient in the long run. Enhancing Query Performance with GraphQL My main focus this week was upgrading our API from a beta version to v1. This upgrade is a game-changer for Twintag, making data fetching faster, reducing unnecessary queries, and improving overall scalability. GraphQL’s flexibility makes it a powerful choice for our system, but optimizing it for performance required careful planning and execution. Some key improvements included: Reducing Over-Fetching: By fine-tuning our queries, we ensured that clients only retrieve the data they need, leading to faster load times and reduced backend strain. Efficient Caching Strategies: Implementing smart caching mechanisms to enhance response times and minimize redundant requests. Building a GraphQL Playground with React To make testing and development smoother, I also built an interactive GraphQL playground using the GraphiQL package. This playground allows developers to experiment with queries, see real-time responses, and debug issues more efficiently. Having worked extensively with React before, this was a great opportunity to bring my frontend expertise into play while working on API improvements. A Full-Stack Experience This week was a fantastic blend of frontend and backend work, allowing me to see how different parts of Twintag’s ecosystem fit together. It reinforced the importance of performance optimization and scalability in building a robust platform. Continuing into Week Five The GraphQL upgrade is a big project, and I’ll be continuing this work into next week. There’s still more optimization to be done, and I’m excited to see how these changes will impact Twintag’s performance in the long run. Four weeks in, and every day brings new learnings and challenges. Can’t wait to see what’s next!