Welcome to the StepZen GraphQL Challenge!

We're thrilled to welcome you to participate in the StepZen GraphQL Challenge. It's a contest bringing developers around the world together to learn or improve their skills with GraphQL.

GraphQL skills are in high demand today and will be applicable in your future professional projects. This challenge is meant to help developers learn and uplevel their skills around this hot technology.

GraphQL is a query language for APIs and a runtime for fulfilling queries to get data needed for modern apps. Created by Facebook (now Meta) in 2012 and open-sourced in 2015, it was quickly adopted by major companies worldwide like Airbnb, Twitter, and PayPal as well as millions of developers. As GraphQL celebrates its 10th birthday, it's gaining even more momentum with developers. That's in no small part due to its great developer experience: thanks to GraphQL's ability to send custom queries, it's easy to obtain the exact data you need from your database or other backends. Responses are in a predictable format allowing for easy API consumption. GraphQL is self-documenting so devs spend less time digging through API docs to find out how an API works.

At StepZen, we've created a great product to help you build GraphQL APIs quicker and better. With StepZen, and with just a few lines of code, you can create a GraphQL API for every data source, whether a database (MySQL, PostgreSQL, NoSQL) or an existing REST or GraphQL API. The API you create on StepZen is programming language agnostic, meaning you don't need to learn a new programming language to make changes to the GraphQL API. When you deploy the GraphQL API with StepZen, it is up and running right away, fully secure, and automatically scales as traffic to the API increases. You can query it from your command line, the GraphiQL browser, or from your app in whatever language you prefer. 

While this challenge is a learning opportunity, there are also some amazing perks and prizes awarded to participants. You can win prizes of up to $6,000 USD per submission, with a total prize pool of over $14,000!

WHICH TECHNOLOGIES SHOULD I USE?

For your project to qualify for the hackathon, you must use a GraphQL API you create using StepZen in the application you submit. You can use your StepZen GraphQL API inside any application you want to build, whether in a back-end programming language (like Python) or a front-end application (React, Vue, JavaScript, etc.).

There are two main ways to get a StepZen GraphQL API:

• Use the StepZen CLI to create your GraphQL for any backend data source
• Use a GraphQL API pre-built by StepZen and provided for you in the StepZen GraphQL Studio.

For complete instructions, see TOOLS AND TECHNOLOGIES in the GraphQL Challenge Resources tab.

who can participate?

We welcome everyone to participate in the hackathon, either by themselves or as a team. See here for all rules.

What if I don't know what to build?

Finding inspiration for your next hackathon project is always a challenge. Luckily, you can get inspiration from the StepZen Community. On our blog, you can find projects that were created with StepZen, such as:

• Stock Trading App (JavaScript, Svelte & StepZen)
• Weather App (JavaScript, Express, Vue & StepZen)
• Spotify Music App (JavaScript, Remix & StepZen)

And there's plenty more - see the INSPIRATION section in the GraphQL Challenge Resources tab.

Count me in! How do I get started?

The first step to getting started is to register for this hackathon on Devpost. After registering

1. Sign up for a free StepZen account
2. Install the StepZen CLI from npm (npm install -g stepzen)
3. Visit Resources > Tools & Technologies to determine how you want to get started.
4. Pick your data source
5. Start building
6. Have fun!

Where can I get help?

Need help? Visit our Documentation or Troubleshooting page to find the answer to your issue, or contact us directly. You can reach the StepZen team on Discord for any questions you might have. We'll also be holding weekly office hours, the schedule will be published shortly.

$14,000 in prizes

• Originality
  The cool factor of the project. Your project was Impressive in its goal and/or execution.
• Technical Difficulty
  Technically impressive project - any nifty outcomes? Level of difficulty and technical challenges overcome. Project shows good coding skills and is (mostly) bug-free.
• Best Schema Design
  Looking at both advanced GraphQL features like pagination and sequence but also readability and simplicity from a backend for frontend (BFF) standpoint. Entry must comply with https://graphql.org/learn/best-practices/.