Survey

[doc-jones]

Supports Objectives 1, 2, 3, #28

Co-Champions: @doc-jones @martinbonnin

References: Comment on Objectives, followed by: #30, Notes from Mar 2025 wg Meeting

Sacha Greif, developer of The State of GraphQL, has agreed to assist us with our survey. Options he has offered:

• State of GraphQL platform
• SoG codebase
• His advice

The State of JavaScript provides a visual example of this platform.

Leveraging this prior art and infrastructure allows us to focus on soliciting data or responses from the global community that support our initiatives. The details remain open and are dependent on further discussion with Sacha.

Next Steps

• Finalize agreement with Sacha Greif
• Invite more contributors to this project
• Collect data needs from others to inform survey question development

If you are interested in helping to build and promote the survey, add a comment below with the word "contributor".

[SachaG]

The code used to run all Devographics "State of…" surveys is actually open-source and MIT-licensed, so I think the GraphQL community could use it to run its own independent survey if you're interested.

That being said, it's open source as in "my code happens to be public" open source, not as in "I want people to use this project" open source. So the learning curve to understand and run the codebase is probably a bit steep.

It's not impossible though, and at least one other team has already managed to adapt our stack to run their own survey.

To give a brief overview of how things work, our stack consists of 4 main apps + a MongoDB database, all part of a single monorepo:

• surveyform: a Next.js app used to collect responses (e.g. a fancier Google Forms). Note that this could probably be simplified and made into an SPA using Vite or Astro.
• surveyadmin: a Next.js app (again Next.js is probably overkill here) used internally to process data and run one-off scripts.
• api: a Node app that plugs into the database and creates a public GraphQL API to give access to its data.
• results: a Gatsby app that queries the API and then generates a static site featuring the survey results.

As you can see GraphQL itself is actually a key part of our infrastructure, as it's what powers our API and how we obtain all chart data (you can actually click "export data…" on any chart to see the underlying GraphQL query and then plug it into our public API)

I think getting more people to use the codebase would probably be beneficial for the project overall, as it would force me to clean it up and document it a bit better, and in the long term would also help make development more collaborative.

That being said I think buying into a very custom stack such as this one is not without its downsides, so I also totally understand if you prefer going with something a bit more standard.

I'm happy to make myself available for a zoom call to walk people through the codebase and help you make a decision.

[doc-jones]

Posted a request for volunteers on the community channel on Discord. No responses, so far.

Posted a call for volunteers in the GraphQL group on LinkedIn and requested reposts. Engagement is low on the GraphQL group even though there are 3600 members.

Anyone can share the link, like or repost from the link below. All help with more reach to this request would be helpful.

Call for Typescript dev volunteers.

Feel free to comment with any suggestions for promotion or greater reach for this call for valunteers.