Breaktime Tech Talks

In this episode, hear my latest writing progress on the Java book, a couple of new DZone blog posts, and upcoming meetups and podcast guests. I also dig into an article on how AI is reshaping developer relations.

• Made strong progress on the Java book, wrapping up one chapter and starting the next
• Published a new blog post on DZone about the agents architecture (first of several planned installments)
• Colleague Akmal Chaudhri pu...

Recap of my week, with several different topics where I expanded my knowledge or surfaced some recurring patterns in my efforts.

• Repeated prompt iteration can cause LLMs to get stuck in unhelpful loops or produce slightly different code on reruns. Restoring to a checkpoint helps reset context and regenerate cleaner output.
• A personal AI workflow shortcut: using chat models to brain dump and organize ideas into stru...

This week included reviewing abstracts for NODES developer conference returning this fall, making progress on the book, and other exciting things happening within the team. Highlights:

• Schedule for Neo4j’s free virtual NODES is in the process as we review and select sessions. Register now!
• Progress on the Java book with an aggressive schedule that is challenging, but manageable.
• Several colleagues are at the AI Engineer...

Wrapping up a busy week of GraphRAG training and book writing with two topics worth unpacking: what we actually mean when we call AI "intelligent," and what a recent article reveals about the shifting landscape for software developers.

• AI models are pattern-matching algorithms. They appear intelligent only when humans surface the right context, not on their own
• "Intelligent" is a term developers should use loosely and critical...

In this episode, I sit down with Roie Schwaber-Cohen, a software engineer and developer advocate at Pinecone, to talk about smarter ways to build with AI — without burning through tokens or your patience!

What we cover:

• Why agentic AI systems burn so many tokens (and ways to combat it)
• How Pinecone's Nexus pre-explores retrieval paths so agents don't have to discover them at runtime, cutting latency and token usage
• The p...

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
...

A packed week of travel, debugging, writing, and reading. I share what I learned and ran into this week as a developer.

Highlights:

• 🗣️ Spoke at the JavaMUG (Java Metroplex User Group) meetup in Dallas — highly recommended for Dallas-area developers!
• 🐛 Discovered a bug in Spring AI's Neo4j chat memory integration with the latest Spring Boot — workaround is to use in-memory storage for now.
• 📖 Working on a Java boo...

A quieter week, but still full of forward motion — from clearing the Neo4j developer blog backlog and making progress on the upcoming Java book, to lining up upcoming speaking events. Plus, two developer-focused content pieces I hope you enjoy as much as I did.

This Week's Updates:

• Rescheduling the GraphRAG Fundamentals training (likely June, APAC-friendly time zones)
• Cleared a backlog of community submissions for the Ne...

This week, I prepped for upcoming events, tweaked and strategized some existing processes, and found more data on how defining a schema can produce better knowledge graph construction.

• Prepped for two upcoming events: a Graph RAG Fundamentals training on O'Reilly Learning Platform and a session at a virtual AI Agents conference.
• Updating repositories for the workshop surfaced a chain-reaction lesson: upgrading fram...

In this episode, I reflect on career growth in tech after speaking with a group of students, along with a few technical topics I explored this week — from Cypher optimization to scaling graph databases.

• Career growth isn’t linear — most skills come from experimenting, saying yes to opportunities, and building over time rather than formal training

• Project ideas come from doing — explorin...

Back from a short holiday, I caught up on a few things this week — including the inevitable yak shaving.

Highlights:

📖 Book Progress: wrapped up another chapter draft. I've been finding that blocking larger chunks of dedicated time makes a real difference for focus and momentum, although getting started is still the hardest part.

🎓 Neo4j Educator Program: spent time refreshing slide decks, resource links, emails, and tutori...

My recap of virtual presentations, live streams, and workshop support — sharing wins, lessons from a humbling live coding session, and a fascinating article on solving long-running LLM memory problems.

Highlights:

• Delivered a virtual meetup for the San Francisco ACM on building knowledge graphs with the Neo4j GraphRAG Python package (code repository)
• Helped as a TA during a Road to Nodes AI workshop covering MCP server i...

This week, I share hard-won lessons from building a GraphRAG application with Neo4j in Python, plus standout tips from Lize Raes's Devoxx Belgium talk on taking Langchain4j apps to production.

GraphRAG with Neo4j

• Built a Python GraphRAG app using the Neo4j GraphRAG package — knowledge graph construction, retrievers (vector, graph, text-to-cypher), and agentic orchestration
• Key lesson: don't let the LLM decide your entire...

Hear my recent experience at the Devnexus conference in Atlanta, where I delivered two sessions and connected with so many amazing people!

• Devnexus session 1: "Agents, Tools, and MCP, Oh My! Next Level AI Concepts for Developers" — a redesigned solo talk breaking down AI building blocks (agents, tool calls, context management, memory, and MCP) so developers can mix and match components for their own stack.
  • Key takea...

Jennifer shares highlights from a week full of spontaneity and preparation.

Highlights:

• The Bootiful Podcast (Coffee + Software) with Josh Long
• Impromptu livestream with Josh on building a Spring + Neo4j application with just 10 minutes prep
• Participated in an X Space panel on the rise of agentic AI with experts from AWS, Nvidia, and Brokk
• Final preparations for two Devnexus sessions and other activities
• The reality of setting...

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 us...

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 unstructu...