Wednesday 25 November 2020

Exporting Spotify Playlists into Neo4j - and creating a little dashboard

About two months ago, my colleague Niels published an amazing blogpost. He showed us how to solve a problem that I really recognized: to make sense of your age-old Spotify playlists that are getting seriously out of hand. I have this problem in the real world: I keep adding songs to my "favorites" playlist, or to some collaborative playlists that I have with my kids/friends - but I end up with these huge gathering pots of songs that... really don't make a lot of sense anymore, and really have not much use anymore. 
So Niels' blogpost was really useful: he used python, the spotipy wrapper of the Spotify Web API,  and of course our favourite database, Neo4j and some of it's graphy tools (Graph Data Science to the rescue)  to make a really fancy new set of Spotify playlists that were much more useable. Take a look at Niels' script over here. So I wanted to have a play with Niels' work in my own environment - and do some more exploration in Neo4j. Here's what happened.

Tuesday 24 November 2020

Graphistania 2.0 - Episode 11 - The Emil Update

Yey! I got to do it again. For the 4th time in the history of this weird thing called the Graphistania podcast, I have had the change to spend some quality time talking to Emil Eifrem, our fearless leader and CEO of Neo4j. As last time, we actually recorded the video, so you will find the zoom call, and the MP3 version of it, below in the blogpost - along with the habitual transcription.

Hope you will enjoy the chat as much as I did.


Here's the link to the youtube video of the call:

Thursday 12 November 2020

Graphistania 2.0 - Episode 10 - This Month in Neo4j

Hi everyone

Hope you are all well, keeping safe, and finding some time to relax and enjoy life in this wonderful rollercoaster that is 2020. Think of it this way - we will never forget this ride, EVAH! 

As you can imagine, things have been evolving at warp speed in the wonderful world of graphs as well. So me and my partner in crime Stefan had another chat about all the things we have seen pop up, mostly through the awesome This Week in Neo4j (Twin4J) newsletter. Here's the chat we recorded:

Here's the transcript of our conversation:

RVB:00:00:01.448 Hello, everyone. My name is Rik, Rik Van Bruggen from Neo4j, and here I am again recording another episode of our Graphistania Neo4j podcast. Wonderful time of the day to start with this type of conversation because I have my dear friend, Stefan, on the other side of this call. Hi, Stefan. How are you?

Wednesday 4 November 2020

Making sense of 2020's mad calendar with Neo4j


As we enter November 2020, I - like many people I assume - can't help but feel quite "betwattled" by all of the events taking place this year. I took some time last weekend to look at all the crazy events that happened ... starting with pretty normal January and February, moving slowly to ominous March, and then living the weird, (semi-) locked down lives that we have been living until this very day I write this, which is the day after the bizarre US elections.

In any case, I decided to have some fun while reflecting about all this. And in my world, that means playing with data, using my favourite tools... CSV files, Google Sheets, and of course, Neo4j. Let me take you for a ride.

Starting out with my calendar

The starting point of all this is of course my Google Calendar - which is buried in online calls and meetings these days.