Welcome to this week in Neo4j where we round up what’s been happening in the world of graph databases in the last 7 days.
This week we have the NetSCAN community detection algorithm, Neo4j to Contentful in Elixir, messaging features are added to the dating site, and we learn how to build trending activity feeds Using GraphQL and Neo4j.
I also want to give a special shout out to long time Neo4j community member Christophe Willemsen, who this week was promoted to Chief Technology Officer at our partner GraphAware. Congratulations Christophe!
Featured Community Member: Maxim Salnikov
This week’s featured community member is Maxim Salnikov, Full-Stack Engineer at ForgeRock.
Maxim Salnikov – This Week’s Featured Community Member
Maxim has been using Neo4j as part of some experiments building a relationship-based digital identify platform.
He is a prolific speaker on front-end web platforms, and has created two tools to make it easier for front-end developers to build Neo4j applications:
- angular-neo4j is a module that makes it easy to use the Neo4j Bolt driver for JavaScript from an Angular application.
- node-red-contrib-neo4j-bolt is a Node-RED node with shareable server configuration that lets you run generic Cypher queries against a Neo4j server.
On behalf of the Neo4j community, thanks for all your work Maxim!
Building Trending Activity Feeds Using GraphQL And Neo4j
Last week we launched our new Neo4j forum, and you may have noticed that at the top of the home page there are links to content created by members of the community.
My colleague Will Lyon has written a blog post explaining how we built it using Neo4j, GraphQL (via the GRANDstack), the Discourse API, and the community graph.
The community generates more content than we could fit on the page, so Will goes into detail about a Cypher query he wrote that implements an exponential time decay function (similar to that used by Hacker News and Reddit) to work out which content to surface.
If you have a blog post or article that you’d like to see appear at the top of the home page don’t forget to post it in the Community Content & Blogs forum.
NetSCAN community detection, Contentful to Neo4j in Elixir, Neo4j Certification Tips
- Vitor Horta wrote a blog post explaining the NetSCAN algorithm that he developed to detect communities in social networks and find influential people. The algorithm is available as a Neo4j procedure and can be called directly from Cypher.
- Chris Eyre has ported his Neo4j to Contentful library from Node to Elixir, and explains some of the challenges he encountered while doing this. Chris will be giving a talk and workshop about the library on 5th September 2018 at the Neo4j London meetup.
- José RF Junior has written a blog post (it’s in Portuguese, but thank you Google Translate!), in which he shares his tips and tricks for taking and passing the Neo4j Certification exam.
- Vaibhav Shah has written a step by step guide explaining how to install Neo4j on Ubuntu 14.04.
Dating Site: Adding messaging functionality
This week Max De Marzi added another three posts to his Build a Dating site series.
In Part 10 Max adds messaging functionality and walks through different modeling choices that we could make when building such a feature into a graph model.
In Part 11 he implements the read side of this feature. Users now have a directory of all the conversations that they’ve been part of.
In Part 12 we learn how to add images to those messages.
Next Week
What’s happening next week in the world of graph databases?
| Date | Title | Group |
|---|---|---|
September 5th 2018 |
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September 5th 2018 |
Tweet of the Week
My favourite tweet this week was by Tim Strehle:
The @neo4j graph database helped me analyze data in ways I’d never even dreamed of, and I think it has the potential to replace SQL and NoSQL databases for a lot of applications.
— Tim Strehle (@tistre) August 29, 2018
Don’t forget to RT if you liked it too.
That’s all for this week. Have a great weekend!
Cheers, Mark
