During my time as a Full Stack Developer at Shopify, I led the migration of our merchant dashboard from a REST architecture to GraphQL. This post shares our experiences, challenges, and key learnings from this significant architectural shift.
Why GraphQL?
Our REST API had grown organically over years, leading to several challenges:
- Over-fetching of unnecessary data
- Multiple round-trips for related data
- Inconsistent response structures
- Complex documentation maintenance
GraphQL promised to solve these issues by allowing clients to request exactly what they need in a single query.
Migration Strategy
Rather than a big-bang migration, we took an incremental approach:
- Parallel Implementation
// Example of our hybrid approach during migration
const fetchStoreData = async (storeId: string) => {
// New GraphQL endpoint
const graphqlData = await client.query({
query: STORE_QUERY,
variables: { id: storeId }
});
// Fallback to REST if needed
if (!graphqlData.store) {
const restData = await fetch(`/api/stores/${storeId}`);
return restData.json();
}
return graphqlData.store;
};