A graph newbie take aways from NODES2020
Being less than a year into graphs and attending NODES2020 was hard, my lack of experience made me struggle following most of the talks, but the take away is priceless.
Story Time
Jump back to January 2020, 10 month ago. I’ve been dealing with PHP, Javascript and relational databases for almost 12 years. Never had the chance to work with JVM based languages, and big data was just a thing I used to read on Twitter. Most important, I had no idea what a Graph database was.
I then decided to switch my career and join Larus, a company that is JVM driven, and something like the main Neo4j partner in Italy.
So, how was my first week in Larus?
Don’t get me wrong, I choose it! I wanted to turn my tech career upside down, I wanted to try something new and going to a company that uses basically every technology I never worked with for the past 12 years was quite a challenge for me.
Flash forward one month ago: we submitted a talk to NODES2020, and it got accepted (you can find the video here). First time speaking to a conference, first time attending a Graph conference. I was really looking forward to it!
First time “conferencing”
The day comes, October 20th 2020, I have exactly 10 month of experience in developing graph related software. I wanted to follow as many talks as possibile, hearing all those great people speaking and learn everything they have to give!
But, each time was the same story:
Were the topics too difficult? Did I overestimated my knowledge? Was too early to dive in all of this? I don’t really know, when the conference ended it was 11.30pm here, I was overwhelmed, so I just went to sleep.
When I woke up, drinking coffee and meditating about life in general, I realized what was wrong: it wasn’t my knowledge, it wasn’t the overall level of the talks, it was my attitude, my expectations on what I would have learnt.
I was expecting to go to NODES2020 with the same mindset I was going to listen to PHP/JS conferences and that just won’t work. I’m a graph newbie, I should not expect to fully understand lessons gave by people who have been into this for way more me. Accepted this, everything comes easy.
The talks got the graphs potential being uncovered. I found out all the amazing things they can do: recommendation systems, knowledge graphs, spatial algos, applying graph to a lot of different domains, and many more!
The road to master this subject is long but, thanks to NODES2020, I now have a map.
Thanks to everyone involved in organizing NODES2020. Thanks to all the amazing speakers. You really drove me through an amazing journey. Can’t wait to meet all of you in person, hopefully soon.
Stay safe everyone!
