January 24, 2025 • 9 mins
In this episode, hear updates on a few projects, including Neo4j's new Aura CLI and NeoConverse. Plus, the promised blog post from last week's episode on Spring Data Neo4j entity updates. Shout-out to the JAXJUG and TampaJUG groups. If you're not involved with a tech group, there are options!
Finally, a review of the DZone RefCard on Java containerization with its clear guidance on Docker containers, native builds, and deployment, making complex concepts more accessible for developers.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:05):
You are listening to the BreaktimeTech Talks podcast, a bite sized tech
podcast for busy developers, where we'llbriefly cover technical topics, new
snippets, and more in short time blocks.
I'm your host, Jennifer Reif, anavid developer and problem solver
with special interest in data,learning, and all things technology.
This time around, I have a few highlightsto cover on a few different topics.
(00:28):
I didn't really dive too deeply intoany one thing this week due to a
presentation I was working on andthen the schedule just being a bit
more chopped up in general, so I'mcatching up this week with a variety of
smaller things that I tackled instead.
First up is the Aura CLI, which hasbeen on my list for a little while now.
But if you're not familiar, Neo4j Aura isour cloud database as a service platform.
(00:51):
And you can spin up databasesfrom anywhere on the enterprise,
high security, high availabilityspectrum to as kind of low level
as a free tier that is always free.
You can import data and play aroundwith it and build proof of concepts.
So the Aura CLI is the commandline interface tool that you can
(01:12):
use to interact with your Auradatabases from a command line,
from a shell or a terminal window. Youinstall the CLI with pip is the command
that's shown in the documentation.
So you'll need some type of Pythonenvironment, which actually wasn't a
problem for me, even though I'm not a
Python developer.
And I haven't really playedtoo much with it just yet.
(01:32):
I kind of was working with it and ran intoa few different issues, but I am working
through those, again in just kind of littlesnippets of time that I've had this week.
Feel free to try out thisapplication or this tool.
I'm really excited about being able tocheck on the status of databases and
connect to things and play around withit from a command line tool, which I love
(01:54):
command line tools, and I'm super excitedto have one to work with databases.
It is still early release of this.
It's 1.
0, but it is still new, sofeel free to play around.
If you run into issues or bugs,feel free to reach out and kind
of work through those, and we'lltry to get things up and running,
updated, and maybe I'll even work on somecontent around playing with the Aura CLI.
(02:17):
The next little bit I played withwas a demo application that some
folks at Neo4j internally had built.
It's an externally facing publicdemo, but it's called NeoConverse.
And this is a LLM plus graph demoapplication that lets users be
able to chat with their data sets.
It does have a couple of demo datasets that are provided out of the box.
(02:40):
I'm also working onproviding a couple of more.
They used to be there, and thenthere were kind of some bugs,
and so they were taken down. And I'mcollaborating with a few people inside
Neo4j to see if we can get thosedata sets hosted again and be able
to add those back into NeoConversejust for some different and hopefully
broader options for you to try out.
(03:01):
But you can also load in your own datasets and chat with them through the LLM
chat interface, and just ask it questionsabout the data or what's here, how does
this operate, or what does this looklike, and it will do its best to pull
the data from the database and showyou images and answers through text and
some information about what's there.
(03:22):
I think this is really cool.
I'd love to explore this more.
I, again, I haven't really scratchedany further than the surface on this one
either, but just kind of playing aroundwith it at the outset, I'm definitely
interested to explore it some more.
I also, last week, talked abouthow I was hoping I would put up
a Spring Data Neo4j blog post
for updating entities.
(03:44):
And that blog post is now live.
Hooray.
You can check out jmhreif.
com, which is my website and findthe blog section, and it should
be listed there on the latest.
I'm hoping to also post this to acouple of other blog sites, just
haven't gotten it there yet, butit is at least up on my webpage.
It goes into a little bit more detail.
I mentioned last week in the podcast,
(04:05):
at a high level, kind of somethings and what I was working
on, the challenges I faced.
But the blog post goes into much moretechnical detail on what we're looking
at and how you work with things.
I cover the save method that'sprovided out of the box through
Spring, as well as some custom Cypheroptions and then projections as well.
Feel free to look at that andcheck that out if you're curious
(04:26):
from last week's podcast.
Then I wanted to give a hugeshout out earlier in this month.
I actually had a trip right after thenew year down to Florida to do kind of
like a mini JUG tour, so Java user groupand I stopped in Jacksonville for the
Jacksonville JUG or JAXJUG and thenthe TampaJUG, so I went from one one
(04:48):
spot to the next. And I really wantedto give a shout out to both of these
groups. They were phenomenal events towork with. The organizers were awesome.
I got some really fantastic, interesting,fun questions from attendees and people
there, and just really enthusiastic andwelcoming. Really great experiences there.
(05:09):
Also, if you're looking for placesto get involved...if you're in
the Tampa or Jacksonville area, Idefinitely recommend these two groups.
But even if you're not, checkout your local Java user group or
whatever to be in your tech sector.
Lots have local options, but if youcan't always make an in person meetup,
(05:29):
I definitely would check and seeif they have some virtual options.
Many meetups now do, so you couldat least pop into the virtual meetup
if you need to miss a night or theschedule doesn't work quite for you.
Or, even if you don't have one that'sclose or local to you, check out
some of these other groups as well.
Again, virtual opens up lots of optionsfor you to pop into a variety of different
places around the globe and listen tosome content or, or whoever might be
(05:53):
speaking and an expert on a topic, right?
It's a really great way to connectand talk to technical people and
just get ideas and bounce problemsand challenges and successes and
solutions off of one another.
And if anyone is interested in speaking,but not really sure how to get started,
feel free to reach out to me or otherdeveloper advocates in your network.
(06:15):
And also, several organizers I'm surewould probably love to help you, as well,
get started.
They're always looking for speakers.
And remember that youdon't need to be an expert.
You can talk about your experiences,your challenges, your successes, the
way you understand certain things.
And I find that looking at it fromhere's what I know or here's what
I think I know, or here's how Ithink something works. That kind
(06:38):
of removes the fear a little bit.
You're no longer being theexpert of this is the way it is.
It's this is what I see and this is howit's working for me with the knowledge
and the environment that I'm dealing with.
The content piece I wanted to lookat today is I am a member and
sign up for the DZone newsletters.
And so I got a DZone newsletter,had several links and I was
(07:00):
skimming through those and sawa ref card on Java Application
Containerization and Deployment.
And it's an author I know.
It's written by Mark Heckler.
So I opened it and kindof worked through it.
It walks through building containersand also offers options for native
builds, deployment, and maintenance.
I really found this was a good overviewof the key points of containerization
(07:23):
and things you might want to know aboutif you're working with containers.
For instance, just building a dockercontainer on the outset, and then
also dealing with native builds, whatthey are, how they work, how they're
different, then deploying those toclouds or what have you, and then
maintaining those, updating them,keeping everything in sync and so on.
This ref card I found, it is areference card, so not everything
(07:47):
might be new, especially if you'veworked with containers before.
Some of it might be review, but I reallyliked the step by step where it explains
each command and why it's needed.
It doesn't make assumptionsabout what you know.
And sometimes that really frustratesme about a lot of technical content
out there is they assume you'rean intermediate or advanced level.
And even if you are intermediate andadvanced, that doesn't mean you know
(08:10):
everything about everything, right?
There's going to be certain littlegaps or missing pieces that you
might not know some of thoseintro concepts that feed into your
intermediate or advanced level skills.
And that's okay, but I love when contentkind of takes a step back and bring some
of those intro concepts and at leastjust kind of guides you along for that.
Even if you don't need thoseintro concepts or maybe you do,
(08:31):
and that's super helpful then.
So much of the time developerscopy and paste code,
but then they don't know what it'sdoing or how to alter it when it
doesn't work to fit their scenario.
This DZone refcard helpsexplain for better understanding.
You know what each command is doing.
You know what each argument is doing.
So then I can determine what Ineed or what I need to change
(08:53):
if my situation is different.
I find that super helpfuland super valuable.
Today's style was a bit differentwith bursts of progress on a
few smaller tasks from my list.
I looked at two, at least new to me,Neo4j items, the Aura CLI tool and
the NeoConverse demo application.
Then I read the DZone refcard on JavaApplication Containerization and chatted
(09:14):
about why I really enjoy content thathelps me understand the technology rather
than just showing the code and the result.
A great refresh and review formy containerization skills.
As always, thanks forlistening and happy coding.
You are listening to the BreaktimeTech Talks podcast, a bite sized tech
podcast for busy developers, where we'llbriefly cover technical topics, new
snippets, and more in short time blocks.
I'm your host, Jennifer Reif, anavid developer and problem solver
with special interest in data,learning, and all things technology.
This time around, I have a few highlightsto cover on a few different topics.
(00:28):
I didn't really dive too deeply intoany one thing this week due to a
presentation I was working on andthen the schedule just being a bit
more chopped up in general, so I'mcatching up this week with a variety of
smaller things that I tackled instead.
First up is the Aura CLI, which hasbeen on my list for a little while now.
But if you're not familiar, Neo4j Aura isour cloud database as a service platform.
(00:51):
And you can spin up databasesfrom anywhere on the enterprise,
high security, high availabilityspectrum to as kind of low level
as a free tier that is always free.
You can import data and play aroundwith it and build proof of concepts.
So the Aura CLI is the commandline interface tool that you can
(01:12):
use to interact with your Auradatabases from a command line,
from a shell or a terminal window. Youinstall the CLI with pip is the command
that's shown in the documentation.
So you'll need some type of Pythonenvironment, which actually wasn't a
problem for me, even though I'm not a
Python developer.
And I haven't really playedtoo much with it just yet.
(01:32):
I kind of was working with it and ran intoa few different issues, but I am working
through those, again in just kind of littlesnippets of time that I've had this week.
Feel free to try out thisapplication or this tool.
I'm really excited about being able tocheck on the status of databases and
connect to things and play around withit from a command line tool, which I love
(01:54):
command line tools, and I'm super excitedto have one to work with databases.
It is still early release of this.
It's 1.
0, but it is still new, sofeel free to play around.
If you run into issues or bugs,feel free to reach out and kind
of work through those, and we'lltry to get things up and running,
updated, and maybe I'll even work on somecontent around playing with the Aura CLI.
(02:17):
The next little bit I played withwas a demo application that some
folks at Neo4j internally had built.
It's an externally facing publicdemo, but it's called NeoConverse.
And this is a LLM plus graph demoapplication that lets users be
able to chat with their data sets.
It does have a couple of demo datasets that are provided out of the box.
(02:40):
I'm also working onproviding a couple of more.
They used to be there, and thenthere were kind of some bugs,
and so they were taken down. And I'mcollaborating with a few people inside
Neo4j to see if we can get thosedata sets hosted again and be able
to add those back into NeoConversejust for some different and hopefully
broader options for you to try out.
(03:01):
But you can also load in your own datasets and chat with them through the LLM
chat interface, and just ask it questionsabout the data or what's here, how does
this operate, or what does this looklike, and it will do its best to pull
the data from the database and showyou images and answers through text and
some information about what's there.
(03:22):
I think this is really cool.
I'd love to explore this more.
I, again, I haven't really scratchedany further than the surface on this one
either, but just kind of playing aroundwith it at the outset, I'm definitely
interested to explore it some more.
I also, last week, talked abouthow I was hoping I would put up
a Spring Data Neo4j blog post
for updating entities.
(03:44):
And that blog post is now live.
Hooray.
You can check out jmhreif.
com, which is my website and findthe blog section, and it should
be listed there on the latest.
I'm hoping to also post this to acouple of other blog sites, just
haven't gotten it there yet, butit is at least up on my webpage.
It goes into a little bit more detail.
I mentioned last week in the podcast,
(04:05):
at a high level, kind of somethings and what I was working
on, the challenges I faced.
But the blog post goes into much moretechnical detail on what we're looking
at and how you work with things.
I cover the save method that'sprovided out of the box through
Spring, as well as some custom Cypheroptions and then projections as well.
Feel free to look at that andcheck that out if you're curious
(04:26):
from last week's podcast.
Then I wanted to give a hugeshout out earlier in this month.
I actually had a trip right after thenew year down to Florida to do kind of
like a mini JUG tour, so Java user groupand I stopped in Jacksonville for the
Jacksonville JUG or JAXJUG and thenthe TampaJUG, so I went from one one
(04:48):
spot to the next. And I really wantedto give a shout out to both of these
groups. They were phenomenal events towork with. The organizers were awesome.
I got some really fantastic, interesting,fun questions from attendees and people
there, and just really enthusiastic andwelcoming. Really great experiences there.
(05:09):
Also, if you're looking for placesto get involved...if you're in
the Tampa or Jacksonville area, Idefinitely recommend these two groups.
But even if you're not, checkout your local Java user group or
whatever to be in your tech sector.
Lots have local options, but if youcan't always make an in person meetup,
(05:29):
I definitely would check and seeif they have some virtual options.
Many meetups now do, so you couldat least pop into the virtual meetup
if you need to miss a night or theschedule doesn't work quite for you.
Or, even if you don't have one that'sclose or local to you, check out
some of these other groups as well.
Again, virtual opens up lots of optionsfor you to pop into a variety of different
places around the globe and listen tosome content or, or whoever might be
(05:53):
speaking and an expert on a topic, right?
It's a really great way to connectand talk to technical people and
just get ideas and bounce problemsand challenges and successes and
solutions off of one another.
And if anyone is interested in speaking,but not really sure how to get started,
feel free to reach out to me or otherdeveloper advocates in your network.
(06:15):
And also, several organizers I'm surewould probably love to help you, as well,
get started.
They're always looking for speakers.
And remember that youdon't need to be an expert.
You can talk about your experiences,your challenges, your successes, the
way you understand certain things.
And I find that looking at it fromhere's what I know or here's what
I think I know, or here's how Ithink something works. That kind
(06:38):
of removes the fear a little bit.
You're no longer being theexpert of this is the way it is.
It's this is what I see and this is howit's working for me with the knowledge
and the environment that I'm dealing with.
The content piece I wanted to lookat today is I am a member and
sign up for the DZone newsletters.
And so I got a DZone newsletter,had several links and I was
(07:00):
skimming through those and sawa ref card on Java Application
Containerization and Deployment.
And it's an author I know.
It's written by Mark Heckler.
So I opened it and kindof worked through it.
It walks through building containersand also offers options for native
builds, deployment, and maintenance.
I really found this was a good overviewof the key points of containerization
(07:23):
and things you might want to know aboutif you're working with containers.
For instance, just building a dockercontainer on the outset, and then
also dealing with native builds, whatthey are, how they work, how they're
different, then deploying those toclouds or what have you, and then
maintaining those, updating them,keeping everything in sync and so on.
This ref card I found, it is areference card, so not everything
(07:47):
might be new, especially if you'veworked with containers before.
Some of it might be review, but I reallyliked the step by step where it explains
each command and why it's needed.
It doesn't make assumptionsabout what you know.
And sometimes that really frustratesme about a lot of technical content
out there is they assume you'rean intermediate or advanced level.
And even if you are intermediate andadvanced, that doesn't mean you know
(08:10):
everything about everything, right?
There's going to be certain littlegaps or missing pieces that you
might not know some of thoseintro concepts that feed into your
intermediate or advanced level skills.
And that's okay, but I love when contentkind of takes a step back and bring some
of those intro concepts and at leastjust kind of guides you along for that.
Even if you don't need thoseintro concepts or maybe you do,
(08:31):
and that's super helpful then.
So much of the time developerscopy and paste code,
but then they don't know what it'sdoing or how to alter it when it
doesn't work to fit their scenario.
This DZone refcard helpsexplain for better understanding.
You know what each command is doing.
You know what each argument is doing.
So then I can determine what Ineed or what I need to change
(08:53):
if my situation is different.
I find that super helpfuland super valuable.
Today's style was a bit differentwith bursts of progress on a
few smaller tasks from my list.
I looked at two, at least new to me,Neo4j items, the Aura CLI tool and
the NeoConverse demo application.
Then I read the DZone refcard on JavaApplication Containerization and chatted
(09:14):
about why I really enjoy content thathelps me understand the technology rather
than just showing the code and the result.
A great refresh and review formy containerization skills.
As always, thanks forlistening and happy coding.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.