William Lyon Picture

William Lyon

Developer Relations Engineer

William Lyon is a Developer Relations Engineer at Neo4j. He also heads up the Neo4j Data Journalism Accelerator Program.

Prior to joining Neo4j, William worked as software developer for several startups in the real estate, quantitative finance and predictive API spaces. William holds a Masters degree in Computer Science from the University of Montana.


Latest Posts by William Lyon

Build a Routing Web App With Neo4j, OpenStreetMap, and Leaflet.js

Hands-On Workshop Exploring Working With Road Network Data and Routing With Graph AlgorithmsRunning path-finding algorithms on large datasets is a use case that graph databases are particularly well suited for. While often pathfinding algorithms are used for finding routes using geospatial data,... read more


New Book: Full Stack GraphQL Applications (Download for Free!)

We published a new book! This technical deepdive about full stack GraphQL applications is hot off the presses, and we want to give you a sneak peek into its offerings. This first chapter teaser is going to whet your appetite for more expert insights into building data-intensive applications,... read more


Full Stack Graph in the Cloud

Editor’s note: This talk was given by Will Lyon at Neo4j’s Connections event Graphs for Cloud Developers. I will be sharing how Neo4j fits into the modern cloud ecosystem from the perspective of a full stack developer. I work on the Developer Relations team at Neo4j and spend much of my... read more


This Week in Neo4j - Featured Community Member Louis Sayers

This Week in Neo4j: GraphQL Release and Much More

This week marks the version 3.0.0 release of the Neo4j GraphQL Library, which represents a major milestone in the evolution of the GraphQL integration for Neo4j. Since GraphQL was open sourced in 2015, we've always felt that a native graph database is the perfect backend for building GraphQL... read more


Recapping Global Graph Celebration Day 2021

The History of Graphs, Interview with Community Members, & GraphQL Community Update — Plus Hackathon Announcement!On April 15 every year, the global graph community gets together to celebrate the evolution of the graph ecosystem by marking the birthday of the creator of graph... read more



This Week in Neo4j – Graphs in AI and ML, Graph Data Science Sandbox, COVID-19 analysis, GRANDstack Access Control, and More

Hi Graph Friends- If you haven’t already heard GraphConnect 2020 in New York City has been postponed and the remainder of the GraphTour Europe events have been moved to online only. We have some great ideas for more online events going forward so stay tuned for more ways to connect... read more


Learn about Fullstack GraphQL in Neo4j.

Fullstack GraphQL with Neo4j

Editor’s Note: This presentation was given by Will Lyon at GraphConnect New York in September 2018. He recently published the book, Fullstack GraphQL Applications with GRANDstack. Presentation Summary Will Lyon is a Neo4j Developer Relations Engineer. He is familiar with Neo4j, both from... read more


Nathan Smith and Erin Schuberth

This Week in Neo4j – Kafka Streams Graph Processing, GRANDstack Football Transfers, Spring Data Neo4j RX, Role Based Access Control In Neo4j 4.0, Learning Cypher, and More!

Greetings, Graph Gang! I’m happy to share another edition of This Week In Neo4j with you. This week we have a look at using Neo4j with Kafka Streams, how to build a GRANDstack application to analyze football transfers, a beta release of Spring Data Neo4j RX, a guide for learning... read more


Twin4j Header

This Week in Neo4j – New Data Science Online Courses, Finding Fraud, Using Neo4j With Laravel, New NSMNTX Release, Graph Algorithms From OSCON, and More!

Howdy folks- Included this week are several great videos to share with you, so find your headphones and pop some popcorn before settling into another edition of This Week In Neo4j! This week we have two new data science focused online trainings that are now available, a blog series... read more


Learn more about the GraphQL Foundation and building fullstack graph applications.

Neo4j Joins GraphQL Foundation as a Founding Member

Neo4j is excited to share that we have joined the GraphQL Foundation as one of the founding members to support the evolution of GraphQL as it continues to become a standard for building APIs. You can learn more about the GraphQL Foundation here. GraphQL.org If you’re not familiar... read more


Graph Visualization with Neo4j Using Neovis.js

Leveraging Graph Algorithms for Data VisualizationUpdate: The O’Reilly book “Graph Algorithms on Apache Spark and Neo4j Book is now available as free ebook download, from neo4j.comIn this post we’ll use a Neo4j Sandbox instance to start with a Twitter dataset, run PageRank... read more


Learn how Russian trolls used Twitter to influence U.S. elections and how Neo4j was used to detect them

The Story behind Russian Twitter Trolls: How They Got Away with Looking Human – and How to Catch Them in the Future

It's no secret that Russian operatives used Twitter and other social media platforms in attempt to influence the most recent U.S. presidential election cycle with fake news. The question most people aren't asking is: How did they do it? More importantly: How can governments and social media... read more


Learn how to apply for the new Neo4j Connected Data Fellowship to work with the prize-winning ICIJ

Apply Today: The Neo4j Connected Data Fellowship at Pulitzer Prize-winning ICIJ

Neo4j's CEO, Emil Eifrem, recently blogged about a data journalism fellowship to compliment our Data Journalism Accelerator Program. Yesterday, at the GraphConnect Europe conference, Emil announced additional details on the Fellowship and invited the data journalism community to apply. Neo4j &... read more


Watch William Lyon's presentation on polyglot persistence to discover the new tools and integrations introduced in Neo4j 3.0

NoSQL Polyglot Persistence: Tools and Integrations with Neo4j

Editor's Note: This presentation was given by William Lyon at GraphConnect Europe in April 2016. Here's a quick review of what he covered: Why polyglot persistence? How to keep data consistent across platforms The new, powerful integration tools introduced by Neo4j 3.0 – Today... read more


Learn all about the brand-new Neo4j Data Journalism Accelerator Program for investigative reporters

Announcing the Neo4j Data Journalism Accelerator Program

Today's journalists don't find themselves short on data – rather, they're drowning in it. As the Panama Papers investigation has clearly shown, today's biggest breaking news stories are centered around data and the stories that can be extracted from it. As a result, data journalism is more... read more


Discover How to Use the neo4j-spatial Plugin for Geospatial Indexing of US Congressional Districts

Geospatial Indexing US Congressional Districts with Neo4j-spatial

In this post I will show you how we can use geospatial indexing with Neo4j. We will extend the legis-graph dataset (a graph of US Congress), adding US Congressional districts to the graph. We will use neo4j-spatial, a plugin for Neo4j, to index the geometries of the Congressional districts.... read more


Learn about a New Neo4j-Cassandra Data Import Tool That Helps You with Polyglot Persistence

Neo4j + Cassandra: Transferring Data from a Column Store to a Property Graph

This Neo4j Lab has been deprecated. The code is available in our GitHub project, but is no longer actively maintained. We've previously talked about the concept of polyglot persistence and why it can make sense to use multiple database technologies together. Today, we will examine a possible... read more


Learn How the Neo4j Doc Manager Helps You Achieve Polyglot Persistence between MongoDB and Neo4j

Neo4j Doc Manager: Polyglot Persistence for MongoDB & Neo4j

This Neo4j Lab has been deprecated. The code is available in our GitHub project, but is no longer actively maintained. When building scalable applications, developers have a myriad of technologies to choose from, especially when choosing a database technology. We want to choose the right... read more