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About

The 2022 State of GraphQL survey ran from June 15, 2022 to July 15, 2022, and collected 3,094 responses. The survey is primarily run by me, Sacha Greif, with help from a team of open-source contributors and consultants.

Survey Goals

This survey, along with the State of CSS and State of JS surveys, was created to identify upcoming trends in the web development ecosystem in order to help developers make technological choices.

Because of the relatively small sample size, this survey should be taken as a snapshot of a subset of developers, and is not meant to speak for the entire GraphQL ecosystem.

The survey is also not affiliated with GraphQL or Facebook.

Survey Design

The survey was designed collaboratively, with an open feedback period where the survey contents were discussed on GitHub (1, 2). All survey questions were optional.

Survey Audience

The survey was openly accessible online and respondents were not filtered or selected in any way. Respondents were primarily inbound from social media traffic.

Representativeness & Inclusivity

While we believe it's important to give a voice to every community, the reality is that an open survey like this one will always struggle to properly represent everybody, especially when operating through systems that already carry their own inherent biases.

In order to counter-balance this, we are implementing three distinct strategies:

  • Outreach: we always try to reach out to different organizations (such as BIPOC- or LGBTQ-focused organizations, or online teaching platforms) to try and diversify our own audience.
  • Data Analysis: through features like facets and variants, we're always trying to make it easier to surface the voices of any demographic segment, no matter how minoritized it might be in our data.
  • Barrier Lowering: making the survey too long, inaccessible, slow to load, English-only, etc. can all contribute to imposing an "effort tax" that cuts off the parts of the community that can't afford to pay it. Fixing these issues can lower the barrier to entry and in the process make our audience more diverse.

Project Funding

Funding from this project comes from a variety of sources:

  • Chart Sponsorships: members of the community can donate to the survey in exchange for having their name featured in the report.
  • Sponsored Links: the links to recommended resources at the bottom of each page are provided by our partner Frontend Masters.
  • Other Funding: the companies listed in the "Our Partners" section on the introduction page have also contributed financially or otherwise.

Sponsors have no say over the survey contents or the way the results are presented, and sponsorships are only decided once all data has already been collected.

Technical Overview

You can find a more in-depth technical overview of how the surveys are run here.

  • Data collection: custom Vulcan.js app.
  • Data storage/processing: MongoDB & MongoDB Aggregations.
  • Data API: Node.js GraphQL API.
  • Results Site: Gatsby React app.
  • Data Visualizations: Nivo React dataviz library.
  • Type: IBM Plex Mono and Bebas Neue.