Podcast Interview with Will Lyon, Neo Technology

Last GraphConnect in , I spent some time at the GraphClinic helping lots of interested attendees get the most out of Neo4j. I really enjoyed, also because for a good time, I shared the "clinic" with one of my colleagues, Will Lyon, who is working in our Developer Evangelism team. Will has been working on lots of cool stuff with Neo4j for the longest time, and has plenty of stuff to share and discuss. So we got on a Skype call - and ... chatted away... here's the result:

Here's the transcript of our conversation:

RVB: 00:00 Hello everyone, my name is Rik, Rik Van Bruggen from Neo Technology and here we are again recording a Neo4j graph database podcast. It's been a while since we've been doing recordings, and tonight I'm joined by Will Lyon, all the way from California. Hi Will.

WL: 00:19 Hi Rik, thanks for having me.

RVB: 00:20 Hey, good to have you on the call. I thank you for joining us. Will, I've read a bunch of your blog posts and I've seen a bunch of your work but many people may not have seen it yet, so why don't you introduce yourself to get us going?

WL: 00:36 Sure, thanks. I'm Will Lyon, I'm on the developer relations team at Neo. That means that it's my job to help encourage awareness and drive adoption of Neo4j and also graph databases in general. So, I do this by writing blog post that talk about Neo4j and graph databases, building cool demo apps, integrating with other technologies, proving out new use cases. For example, earlier this week I was at QCon Conference in San Francisco talking to our users there. Tomorrow, I'll be giving a webinar about using Neo4j and MongoDB together.

RVB: 01:18 Wow! Super cool. And then, how long have you been working with Neo, just as a community member, Will? Quite some time, right?

WL: 01:25 Quite some time, I joined the company just in September. So, I have been with Neo Technology for about two months now. Prior to that, I was working as a software developer for a couple of start ups and always trying to work Neo into the job.

RVB: 01:43 That's very cool. Well, that also immediately begs the question, why, right? Why were you trying to work Neo into your job all the time? What attracted you to it, I suppose?

WL: 01:55 Sure. The first time I was exposed to Neo was a few years ago at a hackathon over the weekend, and the team I was working with, we needed a project. We had read a blog post about building recommender systems with Neo4j, this graph database thing. I didn't know anything about graph databases or collaborative filtering recommender systems, but I thought it sounded interesting. So, we tackled this project over the course of the hackathon and we were able to build a GitHub repository recommender system. So, it looked at your previous activity on GitHub as an open source contributor and recommended other repositories that you might be interested in. It was a really fun project to put together, and I was amazed at how sort of easy it was to get going with Neo4j and Cypher, the query language, and actually build this application. At the end of the weekend, it worked and we went on to actually win the hackathon. So, I was sort of--

RVB: 03:02 Wow! That's cool.

WL: 03:03 Yeah. I was hooked from that point on. What I really liked about Neo is the way that you think about the data model with graph data is very close to how we think about data in the real world. So you have this very close mental map. It seems very intuitive when we're thinking about our data model. For example, Rik is my co-worker, I'm at a conference, the conference is in San Francisco. These are all entity nodes and relationships, and so it [crosstalk]-- so, it seems very easy to express very complex data models. We don't have this weird transformation that we have to go through.

RVB: 03:52 Absolutely. What made it so productive then to implement that recommender system? What was it that made-- is it just the model or is it also Cypher? What made it so easy to develop with, in that particular case?

WL: 04:05 Sure, I think, really, Cypher was the biggest thing for us, and just being able to define the problem that we were trying to solve as a traversal to this graph, and being able to very clearly define that pattern in a Cypher query and get that back right away. It was actually very easy to build something that was not quite trivial.

RVB: 04:36 Yeah, I know. I understand. Well I've seen some of you other hackathon works, like for example, that thing that you built to fire multiple Cypher queries and now you're working on something really interesting to import CSVs you told me, right?

WL: 04:51 Sure. So, on the developer relations team, one thing that we're focused on is the new user experience. So, for users seeing Neo4j for the first time, what's the first thing they want to do? Well, a lot of times that's play with their own data. And so, we are trying to make that process of importing your data into Neo4j much easier. So, one of the projects I'm working on is a web application that guides the user through the process of converting their CSV files into a graph data model, and then allows to quick execute those against the Neo4j instance to import your data.

RVB: 05:29 You mean it's going to be even easier than with Load CSV, then?

WL: 05:33 That's right [laughter], exactly.

RVB: 05:34 That's super cool. I mean, I've been with Neo a couple of years now, and when I started it was a brutal experience [chuckles]. It's gotten so much easier, and it's going to get even more easy. So, that's great to hear. Thanks for that.

WL: 05:51 Yeah. Absolutely.

RVB: 05:52 Very cool. So, Will, one of the topics that we always cover on this podcast is, where is it going? What are the big things that you see coming up and you would love to see happen in Graphistania, as we call it sometimes [chuckles]. Where do you see this going? What's your perspective on that?

WL: 06:13 Sure. I think we're at a really interesting time now where we're seeing lots of improvements in the technology - Neo4j, graph databases in general, around performance - but also around the API's that we're using to interact with graph data. So things like Cypher, it's becoming much cleaner, much easier to work with. And I think this investment in the technology is really indicative of a larger trend in applications in general. Users are expecting more from our applications. So, let's take e-commerce as an example. Browsing and searching and filtering are great, but users are really expecting things like personalized recommendations in their e-commerce platform, and a great way to generate those is with a graph database.  Same with things like contents delivery, we expect personalized content recommendations. So, I really think we're seeing the case where going forward, we're going to see graph databases used in more and more applications, used alongside more and more technologies, and it will feel very natural and easy to use Neo4j in your modern application stack.

RVB: 07:31 Does that mean things like availability of Neo4j to other development platforms as well? Not just Java, .NET, and all those types of things as well. Is that part of that?

WL: 07:46 Sure, absolutely. I think with Cypher, that's becoming much easier now. It's very easy to shoot a Cypher script to Neo4j server from a .NET environment, from a Python application. We're really seeing a standardization around the API there.

RVB: 08:06 Well, I'm really looking forward to it, as you are, I imagine [chuckles]. What I'll do is when we write up the podcast and transcribe it, we'll put a bunch of links to some of your work and all the other developer evangelists' work in the article so that people can find the way around even more easily. So, thank you so much Will for coming on the podcast, really appreciate it. I'll wrap up here and I look forward to seeing you at an event very soon.

WL: 08:37 Great. Thanks a lot, Rik.

RVB: 08:38 Thank you. Bye bye.

WL: 08:40 Bye bye.

Subscribing to the podcast is easy: just add the rss feed or add us in iTunes! Hope you'll enjoy it!

All the best

Rik

Podcast Interview with Eddy Wong, Wanderu

I have said it before and I will say it again: the nicest thing about doing these podcasts is that I get to talk to so many cool people. Here's another one: Eddy Wong is the CTO and co-founder of Wanderu, and has been active in the Neo4j community for a very long time. As you will see/read/watch below, they have done some very cool stuff in combining Neo4j with MongoDB, and that's actually something super interesting for many users. So read on, listen, and try to enjoy it as much as I did :) ...

Here's the transcript of our conversation:

RVB: 00:02 Hello everyone. My name is Rik. Rik Van Bruggen from Neo Technology and here we are again recording another episode for the Neo4j Graph Database podcast. And today I'm very excited to have another overseas guest on this episode, that's Eddy Wong from Wanderu. Hi, Eddy. 

EW: 00:22 Hi, how are you doing? 

RVB: 00:23 I'm doing very well, and you? 

EW: 00:25 Good. 

RVB: 00:26 Excellent. Excellent. So Eddy, I've been reading all of the blogs and watching some of your videos from GraphConnect (see below) about your work with Neo4j at Wanderu. But most people won't have done that yet, so maybe you  can introduce yourself very quickly if that's okay? 

EW: 00:44 Okay. I'm a co-founder of Wanderu. Wanderu is a search engine for buses and trains, and the reason we were looking for a graph solution is we wanted to model the network of transportation so that you could route two buses, or two trains, or a bus and a train very easily. And that led us to using Neo4j. 

RVB: 01:19 Super. How long have you guys been doing that already? 

EW: 01:22 Since 2012. We were one of the early users of Neo4j. I actually learned about Neo4j that year and I attended the first ever GraphConnect conference in San Francisco. 

RVB: 01:43 Yeah, that must be it. 2012, somewhere around that time. We're doing a fourth conference, a fourth year this year I believe. So, it's going to be exciting. So, search engines for trains and buses. How is it different from things like what I do? Route planning on Google Maps and stuff like that, is it very different? 

EW: 02:04 Well, what you do with Google Maps is mostly local. We're in a city so, we at Wanderu, we focus on intercity travel. 

RVB: 02:22 Okay. Super. Route planning does seem like a real good use case for graphs. But I also notice in some of the videos and the blogs that you guys are actually combining it with document storage right? Can you tell us a little bit more about that? 

EW: 02:39 Yeah. That was kind of a unique approach that we end up taking because our-- most of our data was in JSON and we were using MongoDB to store that. It was very convenient to just dump the JSON there and it would be indexed. 

RVB: 03:04 That makes sense. 

EW: 03:06 And at that time, there was no easy way to upload data in JSON format  to Neo4j. Usually you have to use the CSVLoader or write some custom code or write cipher. It wasn't very convenient to upload JSON into Neo4j, so we came up with a unique approach of using an open source project called Mongo Connector. So this is a piece of software that lets you add a trigger to MongoDB, so whenever you add data to Mongo, you insert or delete something, Mongo automatically makes a callback. Inside that callback we populate Neo4j. 

RVB: 04:19 Do you also write directly to Neo4j or always through that connector? 

EW: 04:24 Through that connector. Yeah, always through that connector. 

RVB: 04:28 Super interesting. 

EW: 04:30 Sorry. That way we extracted the meta data. We didn't copy everything, but just the meta data that is useful for routing. 

RVB: 04:47 Yes, makes a lot of sense, right? Just the keys and stuff like that, right?
EW: 04:52 Yeah the keys and the edges. I mean the edges that the trip  access from point A to point B. 

RVB: 05:02 So how did you guys get to Neo4j? I mean what was the attraction and why did you end up using Neo specifically? Can you elaborate on that? 

EW: 05:13 Yeah. So I looked at other graph databases. And at that time, the only ones that I could find or read about were proprietary solutions. They were expensive and they were closed source and they were not-- so Neo4j was the only one that was open source and had a vibrant community at that time. 

RVB: 05:44 And was it a good fit you think? Do you still think it's a good fit? 

EW: 05:48 Yeah, definitely. 

RVB: 05:51 Super. And how successful is Wanderu these days? Are you guys making good traction? Are you attracting good communities? 

EW: 06:00 Yeah. So we've grown from zero to now we have over a million users per month. About sales, we sell several thousand tickets everyday, and the architecture since day one hasn't changed that much. So, our solution has remained scaleable. 

RVB: 06:27 That's very impressive, very cool. So, what does the future hold, Eddy? How is this going to evolve going forward, both from a graph perspective and, maybe also a little bit, where is Wanderu going? 

EW: 06:44 We like to think of ourselves as travel for the next generation, so graphs enables us to model data in a way that that hasn't been done before. So in the future-- you look at social networks and all the information that is stored in graphs. So, eventually you have a social network connecting with a transportation network, and you can imagine all the cool stuff they can do with that. 

RVB: 07:30 So things like recommendations and stuff like that, is that the type of stuff you're thinking about? 

EW: 07:35 Yeah. 

RVB: 07:37 And that's stuff that's in the pipeline already? Or is that just thoughtware? 

EW: 07:43 Well, I can't tell you about it. 

RVB: 07:47 Oh man, I was looking for a scoop there [laughter]. Okay, well that sounds super interesting. And then what about Neo4j? How do you think that's going to evolve? And what are you hoping for, or stuff that you think will be super-useful? 

EW: 08:06 Well, there's one feature that we are really hoping that happens this year is the new geospatial plug-in. That would allow us to make our results even more interesting. 

RVB: 08:30 Okay. Are you guys in GeoData already right now? 

EW: 08:33 Yes. 

RVB: 08:36 Okay, all right. But that's in Mongo these days? 

EW: 08:37 Yeah, that's in Mongo. 

RVB: 08:40 Super. Thank you for sharing your perspective. I don't know if you have any final words or final considerations for our listeners. Anything in particular? 

EW: 08:53 Yeah, that Neo is a great product, and the community is great. I mean from day one going to the first GraphConnect it was great to interact with the community. The community's very enthusiastic and it's great to interact with them. 

RVB: 09:23 Super. I'm hoping that you can make it to GraphConnect as well this year. 

EW: 09:26 Yeah. 

RVB: 09:29 Super. I'll hope to see you there then. Thank you for coming on the podcast. I really appreciate it and, when I'm in the US in October, I'll have to give Wanderu a try myself. 

EW: 09:39 All right. Definitely. 

RVB: 09:42 Thank you, Eddy. Have a nice night. Bye. 

EW: 09:45 Bye.

Subscribing to the podcast is easy: just add the rss feed or add us in iTunes! Hope you'll enjoy it!

All the best

Rik