Gerk Elznik

Hello! Welcome to my personal portfolio, glad to see you here. This is a collection of projects and blog posts made during my free time. I aim to provide some helpful material and inspiration in areas where I found resources scarce when I was learning something new. I would also like to engage with others in my communities of interest, so if you found my content useful, please don’t hesitate to follow me or reach out on any of my linked social accounts for Gerk Elznik, which is the pen name I write under.

2 minute read

If you’ve heard about GraphQL but haven’t had a chance to get hands-on with it yet, or if GraphQL is already being used at your workplace but your responsibilities don’t allow digging into the details by building with it and you’ve been curious how the pieces all come together, then look no further – Apollo Odyssey is your answer!

Apollo Odyssey: Free Learning Platform

The learning platform is comprised of several different learning paths, put together as video tutorials and accompanying step-by-step written guides that include in-line quizzes and code challenges to test your understanding as you go. To earn your Apollo Graph Developer - Associate certification, you will need to complete the first five learning paths.

Developers who obtain this certification possess a solid foundational knowledge of GraphQL and the Apollo tool suite to design a schema, run an Apollo Server, and perform queries with Apollo Client on the frontend.

Apollo Graph Developer - Associate

As you progress through the five required tutorials, you are building a real-world application called Catstronauts which is comprised of a frontend client using JavaScript and React, and a backend server using Node.js as a runtime as well as Apollo Server as a stand-alone spec-compliant GraphQL server.

Along the way you’re even instructed to leverage Heroku to host the application (free of charge), practicing real-world production deployments and monitoring – here is a link to the Catstronauts application I built and deployed.

I took my time as I was working through the courses – I compared the concepts and best practices I was learning with the codebases of some of the development/product teams I work with so that my learning would apply to my day-to-day job too – it ended up taking me about two days to work through the five learning paths, but that included a lot of time spent digesting the codebases of my colleagues who implemented GraphQL components using slightly different tooling.

End Result

I found the tutorials were geared almost perfectly for me and the skill level I was going into things with – not only did I pick up a much better understanding of GraphQL, but I also touched up my JavaScript and React skills.

As a bonus, the Odyssey platform even officially recognizes your new skill with a certificate you can share with the world:

Apollo Graph Developer - Associate Certificate

My hat’s off to the people at Apollo who created this very nice learning platform – and their site says more advanced certifications will be coming soon – I’m looking forward to it!

If you enjoyed this post I’d appreciate some claps for it over on Medium where you can follow me for more of the same.

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