Thursday 30 November 2017

Podcast Interview with Ray Bernard, SuprFanz


The last GraphConnect conference in New York City was a true blast - sweet memories. One of the highlights for me was a visit to the SuprFanz booth at the Community Corner, where I chatted to Ray Bernard in a 360 degree recording:

Ray and I had been connected indirectly through something called "graph karaoke", which you will learn about a bit later. So, I published the above, but decided that it would be cool to have a longer chat with Ray on our podcast. So that's what we did, and here's the result:


Wednesday 22 November 2017

Podcast Interview with Niek Bartholomeus, Clarabridge

End of May 2017, I get a direct message on Twitter from @niekbartho. This guy claiming that we have met at some meetup - I frankly did not remember :), because, old age and all that - told me that he was "working on a little project" and asked me if we could have a chat about it. So we met up, had a cup of coffee - and started a conversation. It was an amazing conversation in my book, and related to something that I wrote about in 2015: analysing corporate networks with Neo4j. At the time, I just loaded the publicly available Belgian Corporate Registry into Neo4j and had some fun - but this guy took it to the next level.

That guy was Niek Bartholomeus, a rockstar developer from Belgium. He had some spare time between jobs, and decided that he would build something useful: openthebox.be. A site that takes a bunch of publicly available datasets about corporations, their shareholders, their structure and also... politicians that may have interests (financial or other) in these structure. Quite a bit of data - all in the best database out there (of course), Neo4j.

Monday 13 November 2017

Podcast Interview with Nicolas Mervaillie, GraphAware

Here's another great interview with a long time Graphista that has done a lot of really interesting work in our French community, and is now having lots of graph-fun at GraphAware: Nicolas Mervaillie. Nicolas has been and still is working on some really cool stuff - so a chat was long overdue! Here's our recording - including a fancy new jingle from PremiumBeat ("Fantastic Voyage", by Olive Musique):

Here's the transcript of our conversation:
RVB: 00:00:03.275 Hello everyone, my name is Rik, Rik Van Bruggen from Neo and here I am again on a Skype call, recording the next episode in our Graphistania podcast. And today I have a-- I would say an oldtimer in our Neo4j community on the other side of this Skype call, all the way from Lille in France, and that's Nicolas Mervaillie. Hey Nicolas, how are you? 
NM: 00:00:26.083 Hey, good morning Rik. Thanks for inviting me.