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June 5, 2026 14 mins

I'm back after a couple of weeks of hiatus with a packed update. From a major book deadline to enterprise graph hackathons, summer is anything but slow.

  • AI-First Java Book. First six chapters officially submitted. They cover concept progression, real-world problem solving, and a developer's career journey
  • Customer Graph Hackathons. First hands-on event with Neo4j at an enterprise customer site, and another one coming next week
  • GraphRAG Fundamentals Training. Rescheduled on O'Reilly Learning Platform; available to sign up
  • Neo4j CLI. New tool for interacting with Neo4j from the command line, with agent skill support for coding tools like Claude
  • Agent Instruction Protocol. Open-source repo that turns skill specs into YAML-based execution graphs modeled as process flows
  • Building Agents in Java with Embabel. Dan Vega's walkthrough of this Java AI framework. It covers actions, plans, goals, and reusable components for enterprise agents

Lots of exciting things in motion — grab the links in the show notes and happy coding!

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Episode Transcript

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Jennifer Reif (00:05):
You are listening to the Breaktime Tech Talks podcast, a bite-sized
tech podcast for busy developers wherewe'll briefly cover technical topics, news
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.
I am very glad to be backafter a couple weeks of hiatus.

(00:27):
It seems that summer is heating up,and it's looking like a bit of a
wild ride for the next few weeks.
I've been hands-on-keyboard workingon the Java book for a major
deadline, as well as jumping in ona new graph hackathon event series.
I'll share what I've beenworking on, as well as some
tidbits on what's coming next.
Plus, an episode wouldn't becomplete without some bit of content.

(00:49):
So I'll share one I've ruminatedon and finally revisited.
Let me catch you up.
First off, I worked on the AI FirstJava book that I've been talking
about now for several weeks.
The first half, the first sixchapters, is now officially submitted.
This was a Herculean effort over the lastweek and last weekend to get it all put

(01:10):
together and ready to get shipped off.
I did some remaining cleanup and editsthe first couple of days this week,
and then finally got it submitted.
I did have some recent challenges.
Most of that has been around justfinding good examples that naturally
built up the concepts throughout eachsection and chapter, then getting the
AI to cooperate on those concepts andbuild the type of code examples that I

(01:34):
really wanted it to, and then creatinga thoughtful storyline that progresses
naturally and interestingly, and so on.
I really wanted concepts that sensiblybuilt up all throughout the sections
and chapters so that you can followthe progression and not get lost or
confused in how they get assembled.

(01:54):
I feel like that's the piece that's oftenmissing when you learn something new.
It's not just the concepts themselves,but really progressing naturally and
building one on top of the other andunderstanding how and why each of those
fit together, those building blocks, andthen how you put those building blocks
together to build a full-on solution.

(02:15):
And the types of problemsyou are trying to solve.
That's also a key piece that I findis missing in a lot of the learning,
is relating it back to real businessproblems or things that you might
come across in the real world.
How do I go about solving those problemsand piecing through those solutions?
That's really what I wanted tocover and bring about in this book.

(02:35):
The other piece I wanted to follow in thisbook was to have an intriguing storyline.
Tech books can sometimes be a bit dry.
They focus really on the teachinggoals and the technical skills
that you're building along theway, which are great aspirations.
There's nothing wrong with that.
However, I really wanted something thatfocused on solving problems and could

(02:57):
somewhat follow a technical professional'sjourney throughout their career, complete
with failure stories, debugging practices,and some design decisions along the way.
So real things that I've come acrossand interacted with that I'm hoping
maybe by teaching the next set oflearners those things, that their
journeys will be a little bit easier orat least a little bit more transparent

(03:19):
of things that might come up.
I hope all of this comes throughin the book, but I can't wait to
share more details on this soon.
Also last week I had acustomer hackathon event.
There's a relatively new set ofevents that Neo4j has recently started
running at customer sites where wehave some set of training by technical
professionals, usually internal Neo4jfolks, our field teams, and some from the

(03:44):
developer relations team, which is us.
And then we work with the hackathon teamsthere at the customer site to help them
build successful solutions with graphs.
Last week was actually the firstof these that I've been able to
participate in, and I really enjoyed it.
Now, it was very intense.
It was more intensethan what I anticipated.
I led some of the training on thefirst day, along with some other

(04:06):
of my colleagues to give differenttidbits and different topic areas
that they were interested in.
And then the next one and a halfdays were very long coding hours,
very intense side-by-side sessionsof how to go about solving the
problems they were looking to solve.
Then the last half of the third daywas submitting all the hackathon
deliverables, putting togetherpresentations and documentation,

(04:29):
and providing links to code.
Doing the actual team presentation, andthen some wrap-up, things like judging and
awards and just closing remarks and so on.
What I really loved about this wasseeing what real enterprise developers
are doing, the things they're strugglingwith and dealing with in their projects
and their tech stacks, and some ofthe other things that go along with

(04:49):
working inside of a real enterprise.
The things that I didn't find sointeresting or that I was, that I
found surprisingly frustrating, Iguess, is that Neo4j is coming in to
provide the expertise, but we're notactually doing the coding, right?
That kinda defeats thepurpose of a hackathon.
You wanna help the inside teams besuccessful with the technology, therefore
you're there to provide the expertiseand maybe research things or help them

(05:13):
through things, but you're not reallyhands-on keyboard for most of it.
This was something that Istruggled with just a bit.
It's hard for a hands-on problem-solvingdeveloper like myself, so hard to sit
on the sidelines, answer the questions,explain the code, but not actually get
to write any of it or to participateand help build the final solution.

(05:33):
Again, I was just providing that sideexpertise and just answer questions where
needed, but I wasn't actually buildinganything, which is unusual for me, right?
I'm used to going out, I havethis problem, I wanna solve it.
I'm gonna actually build a solutionand put something together,
demo it, showcase it, et cetera.
I couldn't do that in this case, andit was just, I guess, surprisingly

(05:54):
frustrating for me to sit on thesidelines and help from a side view.
Now, because of the book deadline andthe customer hackathon last week, I
ended up with tons of catch-up this week.
There were lots of missed meetings,several little small tasks, some
conference abstract submissions thatI really needed to get in before the
CFP deadlines closed, and some prepfor upcoming content and presentations

(06:15):
that are coming up quickly.
I do have another customer hackathonevent coming next week, so I'm really
looking forward to gathering moreinformation and more learning at another
event, and we'll see how this one goes.
I will keep you posted onsome of the tidbits there.
I do also have an upcoming GraphRAGfundamentals training that is gonna
be on the O'Reilly learning platform.

(06:36):
I had mentioned I had one scheduledfor the very end of April.
That had to get canceled last minutedue to some things going on, and I
was able to get that rescheduled.
It is officially rescheduled.
I will post links to that and hopefullystart that ball spinning a little
bit to ramp up and keep you informedabout what's going on with that.
Then I also have some new highlightsat Neo4j that I'm hoping to explore

(06:59):
in the next few days and weeks.
The first one is a new Neo4j CLI.
I'll provide the link tothat in the show notes.
This is for interacting with Neo4jdatabase instances from the command line.
You can also use this with codingagents, which is kind of nice, things
like Claude or whatever coding agentor coding tool you might be using, and
you can download agent skills to allowyour coding tools to handle different

(07:24):
typical functions that you wouldwant to execute with your database.
So for instance, runthese types of queries.
I want to do this type of flow, or I wantto interact with my database or spin up a
new database in this way with this config.
There's lots of already pre-builtskills, and of course, you can always
add your own and just add those to theNeo4j CLI, and then you can interact
with that or through that and with thosetools from your coding agent of choice.

(07:49):
Also, another project that is goingon is called Agent Instruction
Protocol, and this was just openedup to be public on the repo.
So I will add this also in the show notes.
This is really intriguing to me as well.
This is part of a research paper thatmy colleague put together to take
skills that's documented as a specand turn it into a YAML file that is

(08:10):
structured as a JSON graph schema.
It basically turns the skill that'sbeen documented into an execution graph,
modeling it as a workflow of steps and therelationships that outline the process.
This sounds really intriguing, but I feltit was a little bit complicated to grasp
when I heard it from, from the first time.

(08:31):
I had to go back through andread some things o-over and over
again before I really kind ofeven feel like I grasp it now.
But I feel like I'll better comprehendit once I play with it, so I'm really
looking forward to exploring that.
Really, what I feel that thisdoes is you can take a skill of
a process that is repetitive.
The example that was given to me was,documenting how you go about c-classifying

(08:55):
an exoplanet in the night sky.
When you take a telescope and you pointit at something, and can I classify
that this is an exoplanet or not?
The different processes that yougo through in order to do that.
So that is a skills document.
It's outlined as kind ofa spec doc as a skill.
Then you take that, and withthis GitHub repository, you can

(09:16):
turn it into a process graph.
In order to classify an exoplanet, thenthese are the steps you need to take.
You need to find the object, and all thelittle steps that go involved in that.
That gets outlined as a graph, so nowyou can understand the process flow.
Not only is it outlined in a specdocument, now it's been turned into a
process flow where you have nodes forthe different steps and the relationships

(09:38):
that connect those steps together.
This helps you understand anddocument processes really well.
So again, I don't feel like I'm fullygrasping it until I play with it and
see where it might be really useful,but I found this really interesting and
something I definitely wanna look at.
Now, the episode wouldn't be completewithout having a piece of content
that I cover, and this week's isactually one that I listened to a

(10:00):
while ago, but I wanted to go backand review it and cover it again,
and then pass it along after that.
It's called Building Agents inJava with Embabel: Getting Started,
and this is a video by Dan Vega.
Dan Vega's from Broadcom.
He walks through creatinga new project with Embabel.
Embabel is a Java frameworkfor implementing AI

(10:21):
applications in an enterprise.
Now, Embabel goes about AI just abit differently in that it's a bit
closer to an AI-integrated workflow,something like automation plus AI.
So it's less black box, a bit moredocumented workflow step by step.
It uses real algorithmsin order to do that.

(10:42):
And its structure, Dan walksthrough kind of a diagram of
how it works and its focuses.
There are three kind ofmain focuses of Embabel.
The first is actions, which get built upinto plans, which then help achieve goals.
Dan walks through all of this, allabout the project, the links, the
resources, et cetera, and then actuallystarts building something from scratch.

(11:07):
The project is designed to write ablog post, then review a blog post, and
output that blog post to a markdown file.
Dan live codes everything, explainshow it works along the way.
What I really loved about this is theinteraction between some explanation
and background of things that are goingon, showing source code of where the

(11:28):
annotations are coming from, how thingsare working together, the different
classes, the different annotations,the different methods that are being
called, and also the live coding,watching it actually come together.
Then some links out toresources and sample information.
I really liked thisstep-by-step walkthrough.
Another thing that was pointed out isthat Embabel focuses on decomposition

(11:51):
of steps into basically kind of likeconfigurations, which then allow you
to reuse those components and thatconfiguration anywhere you want to.
An example of this isyou can define personas.
For instance, in this particular projectin the video, there are personas defined
for writer, and there's another personadefined for reviewer, and this acts like a

(12:15):
reusable prompt configuration, basically.
You define the persona, and then when youcall that particular method to write the
blog post, then you say, "Hey, I want thisparticular call to come from the writer
persona," so from a writer's perspective.
Where the reviewer persona, thenwhen you call the review blog post
draft, now I want you to have theframe of mind that you're a blog post

(12:37):
reviewer, and this is the persona.
It basically lets you remove thehard-coded persona values of you're a
helpful assistant, you're a technicalwriter, you're a whatever you wanna
set the stage for the AI to be.
You can remove that, create apersona, and then use that as
configuration in any call you want to.
Which means that you could potentiallysay, "I wanna use this persona for

(13:00):
this call, this persona for thiscall," and maybe you wanna combine
those personas and use them almostin, like, a panel to discuss something
or interact in a certain way.
This is really interesting, I thought.
Something that was a bit different,and just another way that Embabel is
going about decomposing these verycomplicated steps that we kind of just
all toss into a prompt and stuff itall in there and hard code a lot of it.

(13:22):
Where now if we can pull some ofthose pieces out, it allows us to
reuse those very small components.
Then, after Dan wraps up, he leavesus with some possibilities for
expansion, with hopefully some morecontent that will be coming soon.
I really loved this walkthrough,and I'm hoping to get a chance to
play with Embabel and spin up my ownstarter project here sometime soon.

(13:44):
This week, I worked on writing abook for learning Java in the age
of AI and interacting with realenterprises trying to adopt graphs.
The last couple of weeks havedefinitely been very, very busy
and a blur of hands-on learning.
I also got to revisit a live codingadventure with Dan Vega, showing off
Embabel and how to get a project startedfor building enterprise AI with Java.

(14:05):
We'll see where the techcurrent takes us next.
Thanks for listening, and happy coding.
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