CartQL

Earlier this week I launched the landing page for CartQL. I was blown away by the nice comments I received on the landing page design and product messaging.

I built CartQL to scratch an itch and as a side project to explore some new technologies and languages.

Since Monday, there's been 5K+ visitors to the site and over 300 requests to try the API. At one point there were 50 active users viewing the landing page. WOW!

I quickly maxed out my Zapier limit and had to upgrade. I also was faced with issues very early on with my form handler and very quickly migrated to Statickit ❤️ which solved all my problems.

Huge thanks to those who took the time to check it out and to Derrick & Sarah who tweeted about CartQL. ❤️

Today marks the release of the landing page.

https://cartql.com

I designed a simple page that would show off all the APIs functionality and allow users to submit a request to be invited to the beta.

The site is built with Next.js, Tailwind and of course, there's a GraphQL demo coming soon on how to use it on the frontend.

Huge thanks to Damian Kidd who managed to create a logo and illustration in no time at all. ❤️

A week had gone by and I spent the little time I had on evenings hacking together the MVP so I could show some friends.

There is now a fully functioning API that's built on MongoDB Atlas, hosted with Zeit and available via GraphQL.

I ended up building the following mutations for simpler cart management;

• addItem (add individual cart items)
• setItems (set all items in bulk)
• updateItem (update a single cart item by id)
• removeItem (remove cart item by id)

There wasn't a concept of creating or updating a cart by this point, each mutation returned the current state of the cart, providing you gave it a unique ID.

I spent a few more evenings adding some very simple mutations and a query to get (or create) a cart by ID.

There are now handy mutations to increment/decrement item quantities, empty cart and delete the cart entirely.

Overall there is about 1000 lines of code to build the project. I'm fairly pleased with the outcome.

It was the day after halloween when I sat down to write the first line of code for CartQL. At it's core it's a simple MongoDB database that handles calculations for cart anonymous items.

I had the idea of CartQL back in 2017 but later ditched the idea because I was under the impression people wanted an all-in-one platform for their commerce needs.

I was wrong. The rising trend of "best of breed" solutions allows developers to piece together the industries very best search, PIM, and now cart APIs together to build their dream website or app.

I'm a huge advocate of GraphQL, so it was only natural that I decided my idea GraphQL based.