Update from Will #1: New website, livestreams, and new blog posts

Hi folks!

I'm super excited to be sending out my first newsletter! Here I'll share things I've been working on recently, new blog posts, and what I've been reading. So here we go!

New Website#

I finally got around to updating my personal website and blog over the last few weekends. Previously it was a simple static Jekyll site with mostly just blog posts, but I've now migrated those posts to my new site which uses Next.js and MDX. My personal site had been neglected over the last few years as I've mostly been publishing on Medium. I have some plans for fun things to add to the site so hopefully it will evolve over time. You can check out the new site at lyonwj.com. Let me know if you have any feedback or ideas for improvement!

Livestreams#

Earlier this year I started livestreaming each week on the Neo4j live stream (streamed to both YouTube and Twitch). It's been fun to experiment with livestreaming, here's a few stream series that I've done so far:

Fullstack GraphQL Bookclub

I thought it would be fun to try an online "book club" where each week we work through one chapter and exercises from my book Fullstack GraphQL. You can download a free 3 chapter excerpt of the book and catch the bookclub recordings here.

Willow - Real Estate Search App Built With GRANDstack

The first application we built was a real estate search application using GRANDstack. We also touched on importing and working with geospatial data in Neo4j.

Building A Travel Guide With Gatsby.js, Neo4j, & GraphQL

Another application that we built on the livestream from scratch was a travel guide of Central Park in New York City. This application used Gatsby.js, Neo4j, and GraphQL to show points of interest, images from Mapillary, data from Wikipedia, and real-time routing using Neo4j's graph algorithms.

Next up we're going to dig into building a podcast application using Neo4j. If you'd like to join live be sure to follow us on the Neo4j Twitch channel or Youtube. You can find more great streams from other Neo4j folks here

New Blog Posts#

This week I wrote Building A Location Aware Endpoint Using Neo4j And Cloudflare Workers that shows how to use the Neo4j HTTP API with Cloudflare Workers. Edge handlers like Cloudflare Workers are rapidly emerging as the next iteration of serverless and a technology that I think will make significant impact on the way we build and deploy applications so it's important to see how they can be used with other technologies.

What I've Been Reading#

It's not purely reading, but I've been working through Esri's Spatial Data Science online course (MOOC) over the last few weeks. This course shows how to apply machine learning techniques to geospatial data. I think the last MOOC I completed was a NLP course from Coursera several years ago that informed some of the work with NLP I've done in the past so it's nice to dig in to a new topic through the MOOC format.

That's it for this week. Thanks for reading!

Cheers, Will

@lyonwj