Breaktime Tech Talks

In this episode, hear my reflections on eight years as a Developer Advocate at Neo4j - learning in public, teaching before feeling “ready”, and navigating the constant balance between deep technical work and community engagement. Get updates on what I'm currently focused on: upcoming events, writing a more complex chapter of the Java book, sharpening Cypher skills, and exploring an article that challenges the default use of Object ...

Fresh back from Jfokus in Stockholm! This week, I'm sharing highlights from the conference and diving into advanced Cypher techniques that make graph databases shine.

Highlights:

• Jfokus 2025 recap: Viking themes, inspiring community, and lots of content
• Book writing updates and upcoming March events
  • Combination of outlining and writing in my process
  • Joint session prep is stretching my application development skills
...

Hear about my hard-won lessons from loading a large-scale book dataset into Neo4j with Ollama embeddings, plus a preview of exciting new vector search features.

Data Loading Battle Stories

• Fixing Ollama OpenAI endpoint issues (drop the /v1 suffix!)
• Choosing embedding models with adequate context windows (nomic-embed-text: 8,192 tokens)
• Optimizing batch sizes and memory configuration
• Using EXPLAIN to identify and el...

This week has been a whirlwind. From starting a new RAG project to getting involved in other community events, there is so much to learn and do. This week had the following highlights:

🎤 Glasgow Meetup Adventures Navigating venue challenges, DJ booth speaking setups, and live coding without a mic stand—lessons in developer advocacy resilience.

🔍 RAG Experimentation Working with Quarkus to ingest unstructured da...

Welcome back to Breaktime Tech Talks for 2026! In this episode, dive into the technical challenges I faced with GenAI procedure migrations, and the workarounds needed for Ollama embeddings. Then, explore the evolving landscape in the age of AI, including new terms like AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) that are changing how we think about discoverability.

• Neo4j Vector Migration: Understanding the shift from list-bas...

Welcome to Breaktime Tech Talks! In this episode, get my latest breakthroughs and insights with Quarkus and Langchain4j, a new vector data type in Neo4j, and details on other projects and events I'm working on.

Highlights:

• MCP Integration Success. Integrating MCP with Quarkus and Langchain4j (Github project). I overcame dependency issues and implemented custom wrapper methods for RAG tools.

• Advancing Semantic Search. Dive i...

In this episode, hear my latest adventures in the world of Java development, focusing on integrating Langchain4j with Quarkus, tackling dependency management, and exploring the evolving landscape of generative AI in production systems. Plus, I highlight upcoming community events and must-watch videos for developers.

Highlights:

• Langchain4j + Quarkus: Read-Only Database Success & Dependency Challenges - progress on a read-o...

For the first time ever, Jennifer welcomes a guest to the show! William Lyon gives us a deep dive into the evolving world of AI agents, knowledge graphs, and the concept of memory in artificial intelligence.

Episode highlights:

• William’s career journey: from Neo4j to startups and back again
• The role of knowledge graphs in agentic memory and reasoning
• Types of memory in AI agents: episodic, procedural, and more
• How knowledge gr...

Welcome to Breaktime Tech Talks! In this episode, dive into the latest updates and challenges in the world of developer tools, AI, and graph databases. 

Episode Highlights:

• Overcoming technical hurdles with Langchain4j and Neo4j, including the new support for read-only Neo4j databases in vector indexing (Github feature pull request).
• Navigating versioning headaches and framework differences between Spring AI and Quarkus for AI...

In this episode:

• Recap of NODES 2025 and standout sessions
  • How AI and music graphs are shaping new tech (featuring Luanne Misquitta’s talk)
  • Exploring RushDB: open source tools for graph data
• Developer advocacy in the classroom: inspiring the next generation
• Updates on Spring AI, Langchain4j, and upcoming workshops
• Blog post on new Aura Fundamentals course
• Solving tough graph problems with Cypher 25

In this episode of Breaktime Tech Talks, dive into the real-world challenges and discoveries from my recent work with Langchain4j, Quarkus, and Neo4j. If you’re a developer navigating the evolving landscape of AI, vector search, and graph databases, this episode is packed with practical insights and lessons learned.

Highlights:

• Struggles with configuring hybrid search (vector + graph retrieval) in Langchain4j and Quarkus
• Pain ...

In this episode of Breaktime Tech Talks, I share an inside look into developer advocacy, discuss the highs and lows of the role, and review new features in the Cypher query language.

Highlights:

• 🔎What it’s really like to be a developer advocate: the good, the bad, and the “meh”
• 🧗🏼‍♀️Common challenges: overwhelm, travel fatigue, balancing diverse responsibilities, and learning to say “no”
• 🏢Why developer advocacy is often a ...

In this episode of Breaktime Tech Talks, we focus on frameworks, libraries, and integrations that streamline workflows and enable more powerful applications.

Key Technical Topics Covered:

• Releases! Java 25 and Langchain4j 1.5
• Spring Initializr Java version default from 17 to 21
• New blog post! Spring AI with MCP text-to-cypher
• Generating Ollama embeddings for Neo4j (Cypher vs APOC)
• Spring AI advisors (QA advisor and RAG advisor...

Explore the latest challenge with Neo4j vector indexes, demystify Model Context Protocol (MCP), and hear insights on vibe coding and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG).

What's Inside:

• Confusion around Neo4j vector indexes - models and dimensions
• Why knowing the embedding model matters for vector similarity search
• The limitations of current Neo4j vector index metadata
• What is Model Context Protocol (MCP) and why it matters fo...

Hear my latest hands-on experiences and lessons learned from the world of AI, graph databases, and developer tooling.

What’s Inside:

• The difference between sparse and dense vectors, and how Neo4j handles them in real-world scenarios.
• First impressions and practical tips on integrating Spring AI MCP with Neo4j’s MCP servers—including what worked, what didn’t, and how to piece together documentation from multiple sources.
• Workin...

It's the 50th episode of Breaktime Tech Talks! And to celebrate, I launched a podcast feedback form for you, my listeners.

In this 50th episode, follow my latest explorations into Spring AI and GraphRAG. I delve into my attempts to streamline the manual GraphRAG process using Spring AI advisors and tools, sharing the challenges I'm facing, specifically with context parsing from one advisor to the next. I also update the Spring AI s...