Breaktime Tech Talks

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...

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 knowle...

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 f...