Programmes / REST & GraphQL Service Design

APIs · Intermediate

REST & GraphQL Service Design

Model APIs that survive versioning, document failure modes, and pair cleanly with typed clients.

5 weeks · 30 hours · Live online · Tue · 17:30–20:30 GMT

From £760 GBP · Certificate on completion

Course visual for REST & GraphQL Service Design

Overview

From OpenAPI-first REST to selective GraphQL fields, you will negotiate schemas with product partners and defend boundaries when scope creeps appear.

What you work through

  • OpenAPI linting, error shape conventions, pagination strategies
  • GraphQL resolver performance and N+1 mitigation patterns
  • AuthZ layers with scoped JWT claims — no magic strings
  • Contract testing between services using recorded fixtures
  • Postman/Insomnia collections checked into Git with environment separation
  • Observability: structured logs + trace IDs across boundaries
  • Documentation that QA can execute without asking engineering

Outcomes

  1. Publish a versioned API with rollback and sunset language
  2. Facilitate a schema review where trade-offs are explicit
  3. Ship a client SDK stub that fails fast on drift
Avatar for Elliot Fraser

Lead contact

Elliot Fraser

Curriculum designer — ex platform engineer for a Scottish logistics API.

Practical questions

Which stack?

Node examples, but patterns apply to any typed HTTP surface — bring your own runtime notes.

Do we deploy?

We simulate staging deploys; production hardening is out of scope.

Honest limitation?

We do not cover gRPC or streaming RPC — HTTP only.

Participant notes

Elliot’s REST & GraphQL Service Design week on error envelopes stopped our mobile team guessing HTTP 418 jokes in production.

— Samira , Backend engineer · Glasgow health data startup · 5/5

Wish the GraphQL section had one more federation story — still, the OpenAPI module alone paid for itself.

— Tom · 4/5 · survey

Ready to talk scope? Request information — we respond within two business days for general enquiries. See Money-Back Policy for cooling-off terms.