
I just returned from this year’s FOSDEM conference in Brussels, Belgium and except for the weather, it was an awesome experience! Spending two days with thousands of passionate developers working on Open Source Software is just amazing.
We ran the Twitter Graph Viz again to visualize the invisible connections between people and tags tweeting about the event.
As graph theory spans centuries to Leonard Euler it was only fitting that we occupied a room in the oldest building on the campus. The room was way too small to fit all people that were interested in graphs and graph databases. For all talks it was standing room only, you can see the activity on Twitter.

The schedule in the GraphDevroom featured many interesting topics and speakers and Neo4j was represented in 6 different talks. My talk on Software Analytics was actually scheduled 5 minutes before I presented. Here is the list of Neo4j talks at FOSDEM:
- Graph database prototyping made easy with Graphgen by Christophe Willemsen (slides, GraphGen)
- Big Graph Analytics on Neo4j with Apache Spark by Kenny Bastani (slides, mazerunner)
- Recommendation Engines with Graph Databases by Michal Bachman (slides, neo4j-reco)
- Using Neo4j as a Document Database by Axel Morgner (slides, structr, article)
- Meetup Analytics with Neo4j and R by Mark Needham (slides, repository, articles)
- Software Analytics with OSS Tools and Graphs by Michael Hunger (slides)
It was also awesome that, when asked, everyone in the room knew or was using Neo4j.

After the exhausing day with too little fresh air, we met at the “La Becasse” for a relaxed, long awaited but delicious dinner talking about all things graphs with FOSDEM attendees and local Neo4j meetup members.
Our own graph rockstar Max de Marzi accompanied his partner Helene Astier who presented a talk titled It’s not a bug, it’s an environment problem. One of her slides made our developer Mark Needham immediately famous:
Works on my machine #testingfosdem #fosdem pic.twitter.com/paylTqu5ju
— Mark Needham (@markhneedham) February 1, 2015
Thanks so much to everyone who made this a great event, especially the organizers, speakers and attendees!
See you next year at FOSDEM 2016!
Michael
Caretaker General of the Neo4j Community
P.S: Don’t forget to
- Download and test the latest Neo4j Milestone (blog) and give us feedback
- Submit your Graph Gist to our Winter Challenge
- Register for GraphConnect Europe! I’ll be there along with other Neo4j experts and hundreds of graph database enthusiasts to explore new ideas, share innovations in graph technology and make connections with researchers and developers from around the globe.