This is the very first StepZen Community Update! Every first Thursday of the month, the StepZen team will go live to share what's new with StepZen. This months' update includes an updated "getting started" experience, new features for your StepZen dashboard and mocking capabilities. Next to this, we've opened up a guest author program so members of our community can blog about their projects and cool things they are building on StepZen.

Watch a recording of the March 2022 Community Update on YouTube.

Improved getting started experience

One of the biggest updates we did last month was the StepZen "getting started" experience. With StepZen, you can build a GraphQL within minutes and deploy it in seconds. You can turn your existing REST API or database into a GraphQL API with just three commands. If you don't have set up a REST API or database yet, you'll find demo resources on this page too.

Try the updated getting started experience, or read more information in the announcement blog.

We've also updated our documentation to help you get started even quicker. In the documentation, you can find all the information to start building a GraphQL API based on your existing data sources such as REST, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and more. Including tutorials to connect other data sources too, such as MSSQL or GraphQL.

StepZen Dashboard updates

Not only have we made it simpler to build a GraphQL API, we also host that API for you. GraphQL APIs deployed on StepZen can handle over 5,000 requests per second with a latency below 100ms. To find an overview of all your schemas deployed to StepZen, you can now head over to your StepZen dashboard.

Mocking capabilities

We've made including mocks in your development workflow a matter of including our custom @mock directive. It's helpful in cases where you'd like to work with your GraphQL API but you may not have access to the data yet. See our blog post How to Use Mocks in Your GraphQL Development Workflow and docs for more on the topic.

Guest blogging

Are you a StepZen enthusiast? Share your projects and knowledge with the rest of the community by writing articles and tutorials for our blog. We will compensate you for each article of yours that we publish, and articles will include your bio and social media links. We welcome everyone that likes to build things with GraphQL to contact us at questions@stepzen.com, and get more details on guest blogging opportunities.

What else?

We're adding more and more data sources to StepZen. In a new article on our blog- Accessing MongoDB Using a GraphQL Interface Carlos shows us how to connect StepZen with NoSQL databases like MongoDB. You can learn how to use the @rest schema directive to set up a GraphQL API for MongoDB Atlas.

Watch a recording of the March 2022 Community Update on YouTube

The next StepZen Community Update will be hosted on the first Thursday of April, meaning April 7th. In the meantime, follow us on Twitter or join our Discord community to stay updated about our latest developments.