Aseem Kishore

Neo4j lessons learned

For a long time now, I’ve been meaning to write a nice blog post about The Thingdom’s tech stack. Alas, that still hasn’t happened.

But, this past November, I had the privilege of giving a talk at QCon SF (an enterprise software development conference) on a part of that tech stack: a graph database we built on called Neo4j.

I really enjoyed preparing and giving that talk, but I never got around to polishing it up for nonverbal/online sharing.

Last week, though, I had the privilege of giving this talk again, this time to fellow NYC folks at the NY Graph Meetup. And that’s given me motivation enough to polish everything up for sharing.

So here it is — an online transcript of the talk with slides:

Betting the Company (Literally) on a Graph Database: Tips, Tricks, and Lessons Learned

Be warned: I handwrote part of this viewer, and it might not work perfectly for you. For best results, view this in Chrome on your laptop or desktop.

If you’re interested in graph databases generally or Neo4j specifically, I encourage you to read this through. Hopefully you learn something new — and if you don’t, I hope you reach out and teach me something new!

The talk is roughly half a foundational intro to graph databases and Neo4j, and half a set of specific lessons we learned building The Thingdom (mostly around data modeling).

So check it out, and let me know if you have any feedback. Enjoy!