When I joined Neo4j, I didn’t know how to write Java. I was a SQL developer who knew some Ruby and that’s about it. Luckily I had Michael Hunger, Stefan Armbruster, David Montag and others to help me out. I realize however that you may not be so lucky. So today I’m going to share with you a set of slides to help you start you on your journey of using the full power of Neo4j.
Continue reading
At Graph Connect this year I did a short lightning talk on building Decision Trees using Neo4j. The slides are up and down below, the video is up. After the talk, someone asked, “What if we don’t know all the facts ahead of time?”. They wanted to be able to step through the tree and ask for the facts as needed at each step. So today we’re going to see how to do that.
Continue reading
In Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, the question “Won’t you be my neighbor?” is an invitation for somebody to be close to you. In graphs, it’s an invitation to traverse. The closest neighbors of a node are those reachable by a single relationship hop, but we can also consider nodes two, three or more hops away our neighbors as well. How can we find them in Neo4j? Using the “star”:
Continue reading
The multiple-origin-multiple-destination (MOMD) problem is an NP-Hard problem sometimes seen in logistics planning where paths can stretch out really far. A far simpler problem presents itself when we limit the size of the paths. Now you may be wondering, why would we do that? Well… outside logistics we have plenty of graphs where relevance drops as we get further and further away. Think about an Article on Wikipedia. It has links to many other articles that are relevant, and those have links to other articles that are relevant to them but less relevant to our starting Article, and those have links to other articles that may be relevant to them, but have very little to do with our starting Article. I think if we keep going we end up in Philosophy or something like that.
Continue reading
It’s time to add “visions of love” to our dating site. So far our posts have been just text status updates and while it is possible to fall in love with someone’s words, it’s harder if they look like the troll that lives under the bridge. So what’s the plan here? Well… like most databases out there, it’s not a good idea to store images in Neo4j. What we are going to store instead is a link to where the image resides… but we also don’t want to deal with having images all over our file system and then having to worry about storage space and replicating them, geographically distributing them for faster access, etc. Hosting images is a problem solved by the use of Content Delivery Networks. So let’s leverage one and build our feature.
Continue reading
Up to this point, our users can send and receive messages, but we don’t have a way to show them all of their conversations, only one conversation at a time and they have to guess who messaged them before they can see those. Not very useful, what we need is a directory of all the conversations our user is part of. Let’s go ahead and add this feature to tie things together.
Continue reading
A few days ago I taught the Neo4j Modeling class in Dallas… well my own version of the class since I teach some of the older material plus some of my blog posts. If you ever get the chance, take the class, it will open your eyes at what is possible when “third normal form” gets thrown out the window and a whole new world of possibilities is before you. The next modeling class I’m teaching will be at Graph Connect in NYC on September 20-21, 2018. I recommend you join me, unless of course you are looking at this after it occurred, then catch the next one.
Continue reading
Now that our users can high five and low five each other, we want to show the other person those high fives and low fives. Well…do we really want to show the low fives? I’m not sure. A few years ago we talked about how to store the people who “swiped left” on a user (aka the “asholes” of Tinder). In this case, the user is not rejecting a person forever, they are just putting down one of their posts. If it’s two people who are competing for dates, then maybe the low five has a negative intent, but it would make the person who wrote the post feel they are doing something right. If the low five was from a potential mate, it could be a case of “negging” ( which is stupid and you should never do that to people), it could be in jest if it was from someone they already had a conversation with, it could just have negative intent or maybe a clumsy tap on the wrong button. We don’t really know.
Continue reading
Up to this point we have a timeline of posts from people we want to date, but no way to interact with those people. The first step begins today as we will allow users to High Five and Low Five posts. Recall that once a user has high fived your post, you will be able to message them for up to 5 days when the high five expires. If you do not wish to message them, that’s fine, their high five gives you an additional high five to give to someone else in the hopes they message you. Remember that all users get 5 “free” High Fives a day, if they want more they have to earn them. You can get a High Five on a post that is older than 5 days, it still counts. This is needed to create the opportunity to bring back a user who hasn’t been to the dating site in a while with a High Five to an old Post. Otherwise after 5 days of inactivity, those users would be practically deleted.
Continue reading
Now it is time to create the timeline for our users. Most of the time, the user wants to see posts from people they could High Five in order to elicit a conversation. Sometimes, they want to see what their competition is doing and what kind of posts are getting responses… also who they can low five. I don’t think they don’t want to see messages from people who are not like them and don’t want to date them but I could be wrong.
Continue reading
