Hello friends!

Welcome to this week’s Sloth Bytes. I hope you had a great week 😁 

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🦥 GraphQL for Dummies

Facebook started developing GraphQL in 2012.

At first it was an internal alternative to REST.

The goal was to overcome issues like over-fetching and under-fetching, which resulted in slow network performance and poor user experience. 

Later on in 2015 Facebook open-sourced it and now everyone from GitHub to Shopify uses it.

What Is GraphQL?

It's just a different way to build APIs.

REST: Multiple endpoints, fixed responses

`GET /users/123` → Returns ALL user fields
`GET /posts/456` → Returns ALL post fields

GraphQL: One endpoint, custom responses

query {
  user(id: 123) {
    name    # Only get what
    posts { # you actually need.
      title
    }
  }
}

The 3 Concepts You Need To Know

1. Schema (The Menu)

type User {
  id: ID!          # ! means required
  name: String!
  posts: [Post!]!  # [] means list
}

2. Queries (Getting Stuff)

query {
  user(id: 123) {
    name
    posts {
      title
    }
  }
}

3. Mutations (Changing Stuff)

mutation {
  createPost(title: "Hello") {
    id
  }
}

That's it. You now understand most of GraphQL.

If you want to learn more, check out the docs.

Why GraphQL is Useful

Instead of having to do something like this with REST:

// REST: 4 requests 
await fetch('/api/users/123')
await fetch('/api/users/123/posts')
await fetch('/api/users/123/followers')
await fetch('/api/users/123/likes')

You get this:

# GraphQL: 1 request 
query {
  user(id: 123) {
    name
    posts { title }
    followers { count }
    likes { total }
  }
}

The Gotchas

Caching: REST can caches URLs automatically. GraphQL needs special clients like Apollo.

N+1 Queries: One innocent request can spawn 100 database queries if you're not careful.

More info in this tutorial.

When to Use GraphQL Vs REST

GraphQL:

• Multiple clients (mobile/web) need different data

• Deeply nested data

• Tired of over-fetching or under-fetching.

REST:

• Need simple HTTP caching

• Public API

• Team already productive with REST

The Truth

GraphQL isn't better than REST. It solves different problems.

Facebook didn't invent it because REST sucks, they invented it because they had Facebook-scale problems.

Most apps? REST works fine. But if you're making 10 API calls per page? Time to look at GraphQL.

If you want to try using GraphQL, I think the best place to start is here:

Den: All of your chats, docs and agents in one place.

I thought this looked really cool and I hope this succeeds!

What is it?

Den is basically a platform that combines your chats, docs, and AI agents into one place.

Think Slack + Notion + AI agents/workflows.

Instead of copy-pasting between ChatGPT, Slack, and your documents/notes, you can have everything in one place.

You and your team can also create AI agents/workflows to automate tasks all without switching tabs.

They currently have over 50+ integrations and these agents keep working in the background even if you log off.

Which means you can multi-task or sleep, and come back to updated docs, analyzed data, and completed tasks.

This has a lot of potential so definitely check it out.

Thanks to everyone who submitted!

andregarcia0412, Kauketz, bakzkndd, xanerin, M3dvidek, pixelated-sys, jw123450, GabrielDornelas, JamesHarryT, SabhyaAggarwal, and ariatheroyal.

The Actual Memory Size of Your USB Flash Drive

Create a function that takes the memory size (ms) as an argument and returns the actual memory size.

Examples

actualMemorySize("32GB")
output = "29.76GB"

actualMemorySize("2GB")
output = "1.86GB"

actualMemorySize("512MB")
output = "476MB"

Notes

• The actual storage loss on a USB device is 7% of the overall memory size!

• If the actual memory size was greater than 1 GB, round your result to two decimal places.

• If the memory size after adjustment is smaller then 1 GB, return the result in MB.

• For the purposes of this challenge, there are 1000 MB in a Gigabyte.

How To Submit Answers

Reply with

• A link to your solution (github, twitter, personal blog, portfolio, replit, etc)

• or if you’re on the web version leave a comment!

• If you want to be mentioned here, I’d prefer if you sent a GitHub link or Replit!

New video coming out this week!

I’m almost done with it, hopefully I have it ready Thursday.

That’s all from me!

Have a great week, be safe, make good choices, and have fun coding.

If I made a mistake or you have any questions, feel free to comment below or reply to the email!

See you all next week.

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