I recently started something new — building my first server. Coming from mostly frontend work, I have started learning how to consume APIs, but never truly understood what happened behind the scenes.

That changed when I was told i needed to dive into Apollo Server and GraphQL.

At first, it was overwhelming — schemas, resolvers, queries, mutations — all these new concepts flying around. I remember staring at my terminal wondering, whats the meaning of all of this?” that feeling when you got comfortable with HTML anf CSS and thought JS will have thesame flow only to be greeted with something totally different.

But little by little, things started to click. I set up my Apollo Server, defined my schema, and wrote my first resolver. And when I finally connected it with Apollo Client on the frontend, something magical happened — my to-do list app came alive.

For the first time, I wasn’t just fetching data — I was shaping how that data flows between client and server.

The complexity is real, it took me two days to fugure out how to delete a todo from my list. Even till now i am still studying and trying to understand how the communication takes place. But the satisfaction of watching it work is also real.

It’s a reminder that growth often begins at the edge of confusion — if you stay patient enough to keep building through it. (not like i even had a choice sef)

I know there is so much to learn and it can be really overwhelming, but as my instructor will say "programing hard o, but we have started and we cant stop"

If you’ve ever built with Apollo or GraphQL, I’d love to hear your own learning moments or tips below 👇