Playing with the Colruyt Data Science assignment

If you spend any time in the Wonderful World of Graphs, I am sure you have noticed that the landscape has been changing in the past few years. I have definitely seen a change: the interest in using graphs has shifted from wanting to use graph databases for "data retrieval" purposes, to now also wanting to make use of it ton "make sense of" the data - basically doing data analytics. Of course data retrieval and data analysis are related, and in many cases we nowadays talk about all of this under the umbrella of data science. Sounds great, and at Neo4j we have made fantastic strides in making new functionality (think the Algo library that you can install on every Neo4j server, or think the Neuler graphapp that makes using the Algo library a walk in the park) available to enable these workloads - a work in progress that will only accelerate.

Graphistania 2.0 - Episode 1 - This Month in Neo4j

Hello everyone!

it has been deadly quiet on this page, hasn't it. That's really oh so true, and I am / was not happy with that. This blog, the podcast, and everything around has always been my humble contribution to our awesome Neo4j community, and in the past 6+ month or so, I have not been doing my part. Sorry for that. Lots of excuses that I will not bore you with, but I am going to try to do better.

Part of the reason for the silence was of course that I thought that the podcast formula (in which I always asked for the three same basic things: who are you, why graphs, what's coming in the future) had kind of run its course. 100+ episodes had given me lots of fantastic conversations, but it was time to move on. I needed a new formula.

A couple of weeks ago, while doing absolutely NOTHING graph related - unless you want to imagine a graph of a bathroom, a shower, soap, and yours truly - I came up with an idea. What if we did episodes about all of the cool, innovative things that are popping up in our community on a daily basis? Sure. But where could I find those? Well, on the Neo4j developer relations "This week in Neo4j" (TWIN4J) newsletter probably, right! But who would I talk to that about? Well... this is where I found a great partner in crime. I thought about one of my most creative colleagues, someone who is paid to be creative and is really good at it - and came up with noone other than Stefan Wendin. Stefan leads our Innovation Labs in EMEA, and has presented on that topic extensively in the past.

Neo4j Innovation Lab, Stefan Wendin, Neo4j from Neo4j

So we have lots of innovation. We have someone who KNOWS a lot about innovation. So let's then have a chat about some of these innovative graph database applications, shall we? Here goes.

Finally: someone interviewed me on their podcast

This is worth a small celebration. Super conversation (in Dutch) with Jurjen Helmus, Walter van der Scheer and wingman Ron van Weverwijk on the Dataloog podcast about the use of graph databases and Neo4j. Listen to it over here over here - or find it on itunes/spotify.


Lots of fun to do - hope you enjoy it as much too!

Cheers

Rik

Podcast Interview with János Szendi-Varga, GraphAware

Finally - managed to get out another episode of our podcast. Early February, our friends of GraphAware published a great blogpost about their view of the "Graph Technology Landscape". The main author János Szendi-Varga, was kind enough to spend some time with me on the phone talking about our industry and where it's going. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did!


Here's the transcript of our conversation:

RVB: 00:00:03.184 Hello everyone. My name is Rik, Rik Van Bruggen from Neo4j, and here we are again recording another episode of the Graphistania, Neo4j graph database podcast. And today I have a special guest on the podcast all the way from the UAE in the Middle East and that's a very, very interesting person that did some amazing work recently with the graph database landscape. It's János Szendi-Varga. Hi János.

Podcast Interview with Amy Hodler, Neo4j

Yes! Another great interview for our podcast, this time with a great colleague of mine who has a big mind and many ideas around one of the most fascinating and under-used topics evah: Graph Algorithms and Artificial Intelligence. Amy Hodler has a lot to say on this topic, and is about to publish a fantastic new book on the topic together with Mark Needham. I think you will enjoy this one - even though it's a bit longer than usual. Here goes:


Here's the transcript of our conversation:

RVB:  00:00:00.938 Hello, everyone. My name is Rik, Rik Van Bruggen from Neo4j, and here we are again, recording another episode of our Graphistania Graph Database Podcast. And tonight I have a dear colleague of mine on the other side of this Google call, and that's Amy Hodler. Amy, how are you?

The Graph Technology Landscape Graph

Our friends at Graphaware, and specifically Janos Szendi-Varga created a fantastic overview of the Graph Technology Landscape in 2019. It's actually pretty cool:

There's lots of interesting data in there, which Janos put into a CSV file over here. I thought that was really cool, and took the data for a spin in a Google Sheet, and then modified it a little bit from there.

Next thing for me was to create a

Graph Technology Landscape Graph

Which I have now made available as an import script and a graphgist over here. You can explore the data in the deployed graphgist yourself, and figure out some of the hidden and not-so-hidden connections in the Graph Technology Landscape. 

Hope you will have as much fun with this as I had.

Cheers

Rik

Podcast Interview with Jess Mason and Jason Cox, Untiltled Folder

Yeah,  I think I am going to repeat myself. Another podcast that was long overdue waiting to be published. I interviewed my next guests middle of December 2018, and it's hard to believe that I only just MADE the time to publish the episode. My bad - again. It's another great chat though - so you should still listen and look at some of the very cool links included below - you will not regret it. Jess and Jason are doing some amazing stuff with Neo4j over in Philly, and check it out. Here it goes:



Here's the transcript of our conversation:

RVB: 00:00:26.434 Hello, everyone. My name is Rik, Rik Van Bruggen from Neo4j, and here I am, again, recording another Neo4j Graph Database Graphistania Podcast. And tonight I am joined by two guys from Philadelphia in the USA that have been doing some amazing work with Neo4j. And on top of that, they have the funniest company name, I think at least. It's called Untitled Folder. That's Jess and Jason. Jess and Jason, welcome to the podcast.

JM: 00:01:04.071 Hi. Thanks for having us on the podcast.

JC: 00:01:04.525 Hello.